


I Threw Stones at the Stars (but the Whole Sky Fell)

by somethingofatrainwreck



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Sexual Content, old school Bellarke, season two divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2018-03-14 21:20:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3425987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingofatrainwreck/pseuds/somethingofatrainwreck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything about them had a steady pace: a couple hundred tiny steps and then one big leap, like the way the wind would blow against a door that never closed all the way, little by little until eventually it flew open all at once. </p><p>Or the story of how two walking disasters gradually stumble into something beautiful.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <strong> Version 2.0, edited, cleaned up, and somehow longer. </strong></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This monster is brought to you by the absolute super-storm of angst that has been season 2. Enjoy!
> 
> Title comes from The Stable Song, by: Gregory Alan Isakov
> 
>  
> 
> ^ This story was originally published at the end of season 2, which- sadly- is when I stopped keeping up with the show. I've gone back to it every now and again, just to mess around with it, until finally I realized I was finished. This will always be one of my favorite pieces of writing so I hope you enjoy reading this new and improved version as much as I enjoyed working on it!   
>  

_…I’ve gone crazy couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell…_

There’s blood on Bellamy’s knuckles.

It’s hardening the way mud does, an itchy weight on his skin that reminds him that this is the person he’s decided to be. 

He feels every fleck of it as he flexes his fingers. Little by little he loosens his restraints, biding his time until all this waiting finally propels him into the formidable rage the guards seem to be expecting. At that point, he’ll probably dislocate his shoulder and turn his wrists a few shades of black and purple- but he’ll get out. 

He always gets out.

There’s a voice behind him, kind and confused. “Did you want some water or something Captain Bl-“

“Ramirez,” Bellamy cuts him off with a gruff warning, “just don’t.”

There had been a lot of confusion that day. Both of his guards are young cadets who have only known Bellamy as a person of palpable- albeit systematically limited- authority. They were still looking around in a panic, as if this was all some ornately planned test. They had to do their job (keep the problem under control) but they also wanted to keep their jobs (don’t piss off the boss by pointing a gun in his face). Ramirez was particularly determined to stay on his good side. 

“I’m sure someone will be down soon,” he reassures.

“I didn’t ask for _someone_ ,” Bellamy bites back.

Hilton, who takes a subtle step away from Ramirez every time he opens his mouth, draws in a breath. “Well Sir- I mean,” he shrugs, his gun bouncing against his shoulder, “you know how she is.”

Bellamy turns his head and glares at both of them. Apparently the men in his company think it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about Clarke Griffin as if she’s anyone’s problem but his own.

“Do I?” he barks out.

Ramirez flinches. His fingers fiddle with the safety of his rifle. Bellamy mirrors the movements. The blood continues to flake off- the restraints are only getting tighter. 

“Sir you really should stop fidgeting-“

“Ramirez, if you don’t shut the fuck up you’ll be on Latrine Duty until the day you die.”

“Yes sir, sorry sir.”

Somewhere down the hallway he hears the sound of his own footsteps approaching. Old boots, ones he’d tossed out in favor of a better pair, tight on his ankles, murder on his toes, a nick from a stray bullet on the heel. Someone had found them, refurbished them for their own purposes – smaller feet, more callous, used to attracting bullets like a magnet.

It’s unexpected really- how easily they fit into each other’s shoes.

Figuratively of course- his physical boots were so large on her feet (no matter how tightly she tied them) that it sounded like a small explosion with every step she took.  
 Where Clarke Griffin goes, explosions of varying sizes usually follow. Today, she walks into the room in her too big shoes, like she’s prepared to storm another mountain.

It’s how she does everything now- eats like she’ll go days without food, speaks like she’s trying to convince anyone that will listen to take up the cause. Four years have passed since their initiation into the chaotic world of amateur war-lorddum. The wounds have healed for the most part- although most people were left with a few scars. She’s the only one who still lives every day like she’s preparing for tomorrow’s battle.

She’s wearing her most diplomatic outfit- her black pants and the grey jacket with the least amount of tears in it. Her hair is clipped out of her face like it usually is, but he can see that a few strands have come loose in her haste to get here. She probably would have stopped to arrange herself if it was anyone else. 

“Congratulations,” she says with a sarcastic smile, “You’ve finally lived up to the Council’s expectations of you- arrested on inspection day.”

“I was not arrested,” he corrects through gritted teeth. “I was detained.”

And that was the key difference here- because as of now he wasn’t aware of any formal charges brought against him. Unless the reason she’d rushed down here was to announce his demotion and scream “I told you so” at him for a few hours.

“You were arrested,” she clarifies, “because you punched a kid in the face.”

This time there is no mask to rip away. There aren’t tiny shadows of shame hiding in the contours of his face. Bellamy knows exactly what he’s done. He’d do it again- probably. He meets her gaze, completely unapologetic. The blue of her eyes darkens.

Fortunately if this does end in his demotion, he knows exactly what kind of career change he needs. Lincoln has told him about the Watchers in the colonies near the coast – men and women who perch on cliffs and wait for purple and black clouds to blot a clean sky. All these years he’s spent watching storms come and go in Clarke’s eyes, he’s pretty sure he’d be a natural.

“He was nineteen,” he says slowly, lowering his voice to try and keep some semblance of privacy between them, “and knowing what you and I, and everyone else in this fucking camp knows, I’d reconsider calling him a kid.”

Her shoulders sink, the first bolt of legitimate anger flashes in her eyes. “You’re a _Captain_ , Bellamy,” she says- as if it’s something he could forget, “You’re not allowed to act like this. You’re lucky you aren’t being demoted.”

There’s his answer. Not demoted. Relief prickles in his chest, or maybe it’s just his arms falling asleep.

“I have you to thank for that I guess?” he asks. The men behind him seem more rigid, it’s unclear whether that’s because she’s just confirmed that they’ve been holding their Commanding Officer at gunpoint or because they were terrified that they were about to witness some kind of display of affection- which is fair, to most people their interactions are a lot like watching someone bang two rocks together.

“No,” she says. She folds her arms in front of her and tries to look uninterested. “Miller spoke on your behalf, said Gage deserved it.”

“Of course he deserved it,” he snaps. She doesn’t realize how insulting it is that she would even entertain the thought that he'd punch a cadet without sound reason, couldn’t possibly realize it unless their situations were reversed.

There’s silence for a few breathes. She looks down at him and he knows she’s uncomfortable. Contrary to his initial assumptions about her, about them, things don’t feel right unless they’re standing on level ground.

 “He told them you did it out of loyalty to me.” 

She says “loyalty” like it’s an accusation, but if Bellamy is loyal to anything in this world it’s Clarke Griffin- and he can’t imagine a day when that won’t be true. As much as she’s tried to change, she’s still the same girl that climbed out of the dropship. The broken Princess that stood in front of their people and called them all idiots, without anyone recognizing it as a vow to save their lives.

When the storms clear, Clarke gets a look in her eyes- golden sun breaking over a rainy grey horizon. You’d dismiss it as a trick of the light if you didn’t know. And most people don’t know.  It’s an impossibly strong sort of look, so full of compassion that he was wonderstruck the first time he saw it (that day in the forest when Atom laid at his feet) and for weeks after that he’d tried to convince himself that he’d never seen anything at all.

But knowing her is the sort of thing that changes you. 

On days like these he hates what she’s done to herself. Her armor is thick, and smoke hangs around her eyes in clouds no light could penetrate- but he’s seen it- seen her- and he admires that brightness in her so much that it’s hard for him to look at her with anything less than desperation when she starts to crawl back into herself.

Bellamy will always see straight through her rehearsed indifference- when she smears a grimace on her face with the war paint she’d stolen from Lexa. She likes to think that people have stopped looking at her as a beacon of hope, because she’s got bloody hands and burnt feet and guilt bowing her back like she’s wearing a necklace of stones, but she’s still a leader- and she’s still theirs.

She will always be someone to these people, and more to him. Even if she tries to slink off into the shadows to make this easier on herself. Even if she resigns herself to solitude for the sake of duty. He’s never given into that martyrdom bullshit before- he sure as fuck isn’t going to start now.

 “As much as I’d love to have this conversation,” he says, “and believe me you and I  _are_  having a conversation about this, I want these fucking ties off my wrists. Now.”

Clarke’s glare remains steady, but she gestures for Ramirez to remove his restraints and allow him to stand. The young man jerks his hands away as soon as Bellamy’s become free. He takes three frantic steps back and salutes- Hilton looks over and nearly drops his gun in his rush to emulate him. But Bellamy doesn’t care about them- now that the blood is starting to rush back into his fingers all he can really think about is wrapping them around her wrist so she can’t disappear.

“I have a meeting,” she says- pulling her arms out of his reach as if she can read his mind.

He reaches for her anyway. “Monty can wait.”

“Monty has been waiting,” she tries to sidestep him, but he places himself in front of the doorway, making this conversation a physical inevitability – completely unavoidable unless she wants to hit him- which would only land her in the wrist ties he’d just escaped.

“Clarke,” he warns, his voice shaking with frustration, “we can do this now- or we can do this later but I promise you I’m only going to get more pissed off.”

She knows what he’s going to say to her. She knows that he’s furious because otherwise she would have just demanded that he say whatever it is he needs to say and be done with it. The eyes and ears of the guards around them scare her and he’s pretty sure it’s because she knows she fucked up.

“Fine,” she says- staring at a spot on his chest, “five minutes.”

He places his hand on that familiar spot on the small of her back and she only tries to shake him off for a few steps before she sighs and concedes. The few people they pass don’t pay much attention to them- Clarke and Bellamy stomping through the halls is a pretty common sight. Of course, in this particular case it looks like he’s marching her to her doom with a gun pointed at her back. At least that’s how she’s making it seem, sighing with every corner they turn and shooting him a glare over her shoulder every time she stumbles.

“Get shoes that fit you,” he mumbles when he stops too close behind her and her shoulder collides with her door as she tries to open it.

“Give me some room to breathe,” she snaps back – kicking the door open with the side of her foot and revealing the mostly empty, completely dark room she’d been assigned by her mother.  It’s barely shut behind him before he starts yelling.

“Really Clarke?” he snarls, “A nineteen year old cadet?” _One of **my** cadets. _. “If you’re gonna fuck around, pick someone with a little bit of discretion.”

He can only see the shape of her- leaning over her desk to light a small oil lamp. “It was a one-time thing,” she says- and clearly she’s not at all embarrassed to talk about this, “He understood that. I can “fuck around” with anyone that I want,” she turns around and jabs her finger into his chest, “I don’t need to feel bad about it and I certainly don’t need _you_ to defend my honor.”

She can be short sighted sometimes- at least where her own well-being is concerned. Something that doesn’t seem like a big deal to her couldn’t possibly matter to anyone else. It’s as if she has no idea how these people work. Why would anyone care about who she’s sleeping with? Because there’s a group of angry Arkers who don’t like the pedestal she’s been stuck on for years. They want her to seem weak, to dissolve into a disappointing ghost of a warrior, and the only way for them to do that is to cast her in the same light people have been trying to cast women in for centuries. A thing, not a person. An idea, not a reality. Something attainable and exchangeable and not at all Clarke Griffin.

“Do you know what he was saying?” Bellamy asks- trying to calm himself down so she won’t just dismiss him as hysterical and storm from the room, “Do you have any idea the things he was talking about on patrol?”

“I really don’t care,” she promises- probably truthfully, foolishly.  
   
His fingers start to twitch again- the way they did when Miller had all but drug him around the corner in the barracks to eavesdrop on a congregation of new recruits. Tom Gage had been standing in the center with a big grin and raised eyebrows, theatrically telling a story that Bellamy is sure started with “Did you guys see how drunk Clarke Griffin was at the fire last night?” To which all of them would have nodded, because while she wasn’t stumbling around, she was certainly smiling in that way that only moonshine could make her smile. Bellamy had been on the other side of camp arguing with Marcus Kane about ammunition restrictions- though he doubts he’d have been able to intervene even if he’d seen it firsthand. When Clarke wanted something, she got it. Only this time wanting a distraction had only given her disappointing sex (that was an assumption) with a spindly little loud mouth who obviously didn’t anticipate Bellamy’s admittedly inappropriate instinct to knock his fucking teeth out.  

“Really?” he questions, “you don’t care that he was telling my entire company that you were begging for it-“

She held both of her hands up to stop him and then crossed them in front of her. “No one is going to believe that.”

She didn’t understand that it wasn’t about believing. She didn’t comprehend that Gage had just changed the way all of those men would look at her, the ones who never experienced her as a leader. The ones who just heard stories about the Traitor’s daughter who destroyed the Mountain. She was beautiful- and they were all probably fantasizing about her anyway, but not like this- not the way Gage was making her seem.

Clarke and Bellamy had never crossed that line- but he knew her well enough to be sure that she would never beg anyone for anything. And if she did- it wouldn’t be with a kid like Gage, it would be with someone who put the time in. Someone who would never tell another person what went on between them because it meant too much.

Someone who actually saw her.

He was pissed because she deserved better- and she should have known that. It wasn’t fair to her to have something she did in the dark dragged out into the light so a bunch of fucking idiots could laugh about it. She’d saved the fucking world. She deserved respect. But of course- in true Clarke fashion- instead of realizing that, she glared at him like he’d just called her a slut.

“So what is this?” she asks, “I’ve ruined my good name because I had sex with someone?”

He glares right back at her, “I didn’t say that,” he says, “Have as much sex as you want, but you’re on the council Clarke. You could be Chancellor one day. Stop being so fucking reckless.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” she says with wide eyes, “It’s just sex. You do it. Obviously your sister does it. Everyone in this camp does it. It’s a part of being a human, a natural biological stress reliever, and I am not going to be ashamed of having a sex life just because my mother is the chancellor.”

Bellamy balks at the mention of his sister and tries not to groan in frustration. “That is so far from the fucking point…”

“Then what is your point?” she demands, “Because I have somewhere to be.”

He drags his hands across his face, catches a whiff of the blood still caked on his knuckles. “I don’t care if you want to have a sex life,” he says- though a bad taste in his mouth makes him wonder if he kind of does, “but at least value yourself enough to have one with someone who respects you.”

She gets that part of it at least. He can tell. She takes a step backward and looks away. Usually avoiding his eyes is an indicator that she knows he’s right. He’s learned to take the sight of her staring off at a spot over his shoulder in silence as a type of apology or thank you…depending on the circumstances.

Gage was a bad idea. It was unprofessional and reckless and honestly he finds it hard to believe that she didn’t anticipate Bellamy Blake's reaction to some kid talking about her, the way he won’t even allow himself to think of her.

But maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe to her sex really is just a natural, biological stress reliever.

“Are you done?” she finally snaps, once he’s made it clear that he’s not just going to cower away from her frustration and run from the room.

“For now,” he concedes.

“Good.” She bumps his shoulder when she storms past, but stops and sighs before she opens the door- a sigh heavy with obligation. “Octavia is doing well,” she says, “She came in for her three-month check-up this morning.”

A smile slips onto his face at the thought of his sister and the bump that was just barely visible under her shirt. He’d be an uncle in less than six months. He'd just gotten to the point where he's stopped worrying about everything that could possibly go wrong and started to appreciate how incredible and surreal it must be for O. Even though he and Lincoln had been through some serious shit with each other, he was happy for them, for his family. “Good to hear,” he says- and then more clearly, “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“No, I have-“

“Clarke,” he warns. He won’t let this affect them- won’t let her loneliness and some immature kid who had simply stumbled into her life do any more damage than the slight bruising on his knuckles and whatever lecture Kane was rehearsing for him. Maybe he’d overreacted, and as he stood there he was starting to feel an itch of shame for blaming her, but he’d done it to protect her- like almost every other thing he does.

She doesn’t turn around, but he can imagine her face scrunched up in frustration before giving a sharp nod- and then she’s slamming the door behind her.

Very few people understand what it is about Clarke that’s so important to him.  

Sometimes even Octavia questions it - _”What do you get out of it, really?”_

It’s entirely possible that he’ll always be seen as some poor downtrodden knight pining after a beautiful princess the earth has destroyed.

Something like Lancelot and Guinevere.

But the way he feels about her isn’t something as common as romance or lust. It’s devotion.

 Clarke is his, his friend, his partner, an actual part of him. She’s a shoulder when he’s stumbling, a hand to grab onto in the disorientation of sleepless nights. Her words are a windstorm in the back of his mind, a conscience, an inspiration, a reminder that someone out there believes in him-unconditionally.

 Clarke has never given up on him, not when she knew the horrible things he’d done, not when he’d done horrible things right in front of her. No amount of blood on his hands has ever made her turn her back on him.

For every dark cloud in her eyes- there was something more. She was safety, and confidence, and hope. Until her dying day, she would try to be for everyone what she was to him.  

She’d fight for it.

And Bellamy Blake, who has spent every second of his life on earth fighting, would continue on- even after the Mountain, after the Grounders, after rebellions or civil wars. He’ll spend his days with a rifle in his hand, and in those moments of peace battle that earth-born plague of guilt and stoicism slowly draining the humanity from Clarke Griffin.

And he’ll win. In the end, he always wins.

**...**

Sometimes she sees ghosts.

Wispy images that float between her eyes and the tree line, a haze of mourning. And they aren’t even recognizable, not like the few times- in her grief and exhaustion- that she saw Finn glaring at her in the shadows. It’s a shapeless sort of haunting, like feeling them is what really makes her see them, like something is watching her- always.

Bellamy would call it a trick of the light. That’s one of his favorites- explain the unexplainable by accusing the sun of being a liar- but Bellamy is confrontational, and stubborn, and as much of a pain in the ass as he is an asset if she’s being honest. He understands though- usually- when she can’t find the words, when she’s already made up her mind, when the world is too loud even in the quiet morning hours of their deserted camp. He understands her, and that’s invaluable.

She doesn’t tell him about the ghosts. Especially not this morning, when his knuckles are still bruised and he knows there’s nothing he can do to hide them from the prying eyes at tonight’s council meeting.

The cadet, Tom, had apologized to her as she was leaving dinner last night. It’s more than she expected. He was young and unimportant and it had been easy. That’s why she did it- because it was easy. It was sex with another person who was only looking at it as sex. Besides, she liked his smile. It reminded her of Lexa actually- maybe a smile she could have had once, before the warpaint. It was carefree but calculated, fit perfectly in the center of his face like he was born to wear it all the time. He projected strength, maybe it was only superficial- but it was something she felt she needed at the time, because there were ghosts along the tree line and she’d been having that nightmare about Wells again.

It was something that happened, and now it was over.

Bellamy shouldn’t have gotten involved, but maybe that was her fault. Tom liked to talk, she knew that. And Bellamy- Bellamy loved excuses to default to his baser instincts, punch Tom, hang Atom up by his arms, protect the women he’d put on a pedestal because his tunnel vision prevented him from seeing anything other than what he wanted to see.

That was true for her and Octavia- for very different reasons.

But it’s over now, and it wasn’t the worst mistake she’d ever made.

“What are you doing?”

She looks away from the trees, glances over her shoulder. Raven reties her ponytail as she approaches her.  She’s obviously exhausted, smudges of grease hidden in the shadows of her face where you’d only see them if you knew what you were looking for. She works too much- but Clarke can’t really stomach the hypocrisy of telling her so.

“Needed to think,” she says, “before the meeting.”

“Yeah well Bellamy is looking for you.”

She snorts, “What else is new?”

Raven reaches her side, crosses her arms and looks out at the part of the forest visible through the entrance gate of the wall.

“When you stand here like this,” she says- as if it’s become a noticeable habit, “you look like you’re about to run.”

Clarke shakes her head, “Where would I run to?”

“Does it matter?”

A few members of the guard walk by, they don’t laugh or point, but they glance at her until she catches their eye, and then look away so fast they nearly trip.

“Embarrassed?” Raven asks. That’s the closest they’ve come to talking about it- hypocrisy again.

“Not at all.” It’s true. Nothing about this embarrasses her- irritates her a bit, maybe she’s disappointed in her own impulses, but mostly this whole thing just makes her feel emptier than she already did. “How is this my life Raven?” she asks, “Bellamy is punching people to defend my honor and all I do is sit around a table once a week and argue about crops and lumber-”

“You do more than that,” she says.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“Oh come on Clarke, what- you miss war?”

“No.”

She misses feeling like someone.

She misses feeling like there was something just beyond the horizon- waiting for her.

There are only ghosts now.

“Forget it,” she says, “I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Talk to your Mom-“

Clarke sighs and pushes the hair out of her eyes, “I’m not giving that woman any more ammunition against me.”

“Look, whatever is going on with you-“she struggles to find the words, “I know it seems like things aren’t getting better, but- I think that’s just because we don’t know what better is. We could have a life Clarke- here.  You could have a life.”

“Is that what you want?” she asks, “to stay here?”

“I want to help make this place livable. I bled for it, I should be able to enjoy it. So did you- whatever that means, sleeping with cadets, being an ambassador with the grounders, a surgeon, the chancellor, whatever the fuck is going to make you happy it’s time you start doing it.”

Clarke almost smiles, her words don’t really sink in, they’re just words after all, but she appreciates the effort. It’s a nice thought. Raven certainly deserves it. “We’ve had this conversation before,” she reminds her, “that time you were trying to convince me to sleep with Bellamy-“

“Yeah well,” she grins, “I still recommend that, but I get it. I’m not going to be that person that tries to make you see something that isn’t there.”

“I see Bellamy.” 

The words just sort of come out, mostly because she’s getting that feeling again, like something is watching her.

“Yeah?” Raven asks, “Does he know that?”

She turns away from the trees, “We have an understanding,” she says, “we both know what this can and can’t be. Co-dependence would be a disaster-“

“Is that what you think love is? Co-dependence?”

Raven doesn’t know any more about love than Clarke does- but now isn’t the time to point that out. 

“Raven I’m not going to run,” she assures her, “I’ve invested my life in these people. I’m always going to do all I can for them. I don’t need any other reason to stay.”

“Yeah but you have them Clarke,” she says. “Just don’t forget that.”

“Clarke!!”

They both turn when they hear his voice, standing at the base of the hill with his hands cupped around his mouth, “They’re already in Chambers- save the gossip for later.”

She rolls her eyes and fights the urge to smile. “I should go,” she says- patting Raven once on the arm.

“Yeah you should,” she says, laughing a bit herself.

When Clarke falls in step with Bellamy, she immediately starts on her ideas about expanding the perimeter of the wall. Which doesn’t give him the chance to ask her any of the questions Raven just had.

“Let’s get it drafted out before we present it,” he says- because he’s fitting into a political roll much neater than either of them would have expected.  “You and I can spend some time doing measurements tomorrow-“

“I thought you said this was a bad idea?”

“That’s not what I said, I said that the council would argue that it’s a waste of resources unless we can prove otherwise.”

She gives him a suspicious look, “You don’t have to do that. You and I may be a united front against them but you don’t have to agree with everything-“

“Are you really about to accuse me of agreeing with everything you say?” he asks.

“I’m just saying- I don’t always need your support if-“

“Well, you’ve got it,” he says- in that way he says everything that’s just simple and true.

The meeting is basically as unproductive as it usually is. Clarke finds that she doesn’t have much to say.

Bellamy spends fifteen minutes adamantly arguing against a currency system because, “the last thing we need to be doing is building another ARK and if you think there isn’t an already established class system that will only be enforced by reinstating currency, you’re blind.” And “what we’ve established with the grounders is working, trade is working, don’t fix what isn’t broken. Maybe when we start to expand we can consider it.”

He’s characteristically succinct- unusually reserved.  Uses words she’s spoken as if he’s quoting from a holy document. He doesn’t try to conceal his knuckles once. He’s strong and honest and composed, and as is usually the case on days when she feels lost, Clarke watches him.  
 


	2. Chapter 2

They meet with the grounders at least once a month. Sometimes they travel beyond the forest clans. Sometimes it’s a matter of speaking to Lexa just outside of the gates. 

Regardless, Clarke doesn’t go alone.

It’s an episodic argument of theirs- reserved for times when they’re both filled with something that feels like fury, with nothing current or tangible to be furious about.

She always tries to make it about trust- which is laughable because short of ripping out his heart and letting her carry it around in her pocket, he’s not sure what else he could do to prove to her that he trusts her more than he ever thought he could trust a person (the way he trusts his own lungs to keep breathing, the way he trusts the sun not to fall out of the sky).

Then she calls him a watchdog, criticizes his priorities and suggests that the pissed off look on his face has threatened every one of their diplomatic meetings.

Finally, she’ll tell him that it’s stupid for both of them to be out of camp at the same time. Because what if something happens and they both end up dead and their faction of people are left to stumble around under a Council that basically still considers them criminals? And when he offers to send a few of his men instead, she gets even angrier because she can handle herself out there better than all of them combined.

She’s not wrong about any of it.

He just worries. He’ll never admit it, because neither of them want to acknowledge what she’s always been capable of, but sometimes he’s genuinely concerned that she’ll disappear out there. That maybe once, the voice in the back of her mind screaming at her to run will overpower all of her other instincts and she’ll make a home amongst the trees- or the Grounders, that would be worse.

All he ever says in response is “You’re not going alone.” Eventually she accepts it as a causality of his pride. But they’ll have the same argument again in a couple of months.

She rides ahead of them, next to Lexa if she can stand it, listening to stories of other clans or asking about plants and animals they still haven’t come in contact with. 

Sometimes Bellamy just walks along in contented silence, other times (when he’s lucky) he’s got Miller or Murphy or some unlucky cadet to talk to.

This time there’s just Lincoln, watching Bellamy’s eyes glued to Clarke’s back.

“Octavia worries about you,” he says.

Bellamy barely hears him, “She doesn’t need too.”

“But she does.”

When he doesn’t respond, Lincoln shifts his path a bit closer. “You and I are connected Bellamy,” he says, “through your sister, through my child. We’re family-“

Bellamy cuts him off by kicking a stone out of their path, “ _You_ married into _my_ family.”

Clarke turns around and glares at him when the stone ricochets off of a nearby tree stump.

Lincoln smiles, he mumbles something in Trigedasleng. Bellamy is pretty sure it’s an insult.

“What was that?” he snaps.

Lincoln continues to smile. “When I was young and visited the clan on the coast, there was a storm. Their lands were flooded with seawater, destroyed by wind and trees. We arrived a few days after it had passed. What we saw was a village in ruins- but the people who lived there didn’t lose anything. They used the fallen trees to rebuild, the rainwater for cooking and cleaning, the tides brought more fish to the shore and the children stared up at the sky as if they’d never seen the color before. The storm changed their home, but it was still home. They were thankful for survival, loyal to their land, no tragedy could change that. Baiu Catas , they said - beautiful disaster.”

Bellamy continues to stare ahead, bitterly counting his footsteps to keep himself from snapping. Lincoln is a man of very few words. He’s not a poet. Somewhere in that fluffy little story about a storm on a beach there was a point, one that was probably put into his head by Octavia.

“Octavia may worry,” Bellamy glances over in time to catch Lincoln’s nod to Clarke, “but I understand what you see when you look at her.”

Bellamy takes a deep breath and goes back to counting his steps. He doesn’t want to scream at Lincoln, not here. Clarke would be furious, O would never let him hear the end of it, and honestly he just isn’t in the mood. Lincoln’s not the first person to try and take his relationship with Clarke and explain it to him like he was a confused child.

“Not looking for a discussion,” he finally says.

Lincoln nods again. They’re silent for the rest of the trip- a smug silence and an angry one. Bellamy traps himself in his head, thinking about beaches, and storms, and the way everything always seems to come back to the color of Clarke’s eyes.

That night they stay with a small clan west of the river. Very small, but very knowledgeable. Lexa’s people claim that this clan- whom they simply refer to as Mother Mau’s people, have the largest collection of books in the region. They wouldn’t meet with the SkyPeople unless they “came with friends.”

“A story teller lived on their land,” Lexa said, because she knew their stories, knew their leader as if she were a surrogate mother. “One day they started to dig a well and found books.”

It’s not a necessity- but with people starting to have children, it would be nice to have something other than the archive back-up files and whatever torn up books they’d found themselves. These kinds of missions were about living- not surviving.

The leader, Mother Mau, is an older woman wearing a shawl made out of dirty wool. She dotes on Clarke and Lexa, giving them extra wine and a piece of honeycomb after dinner. They talk about flowers, and songs, and _the Goddess._ Clarke enjoys herself, Bellamy enjoys being left alone, and every time Clarke looks back at him he feels Mother Mau giving him a suspicious glower.

That night, they are provided with three small huts (made mostly of branches and hardened mud) to sleep in. A big humid cloud of awkwardness floats between them, because the reasonable thing to do is have Lexa and Clarke share while those from each side take what’s left. But Bellamy knows why that can’t happen- and maybe Lincoln does too- because he lifts Lexa’s pack from the pile and walks it towards the furthest one, leaving her warriors to camp around it.

Lexa almost laughs at the gesture. She shakes her head and continues talking to Clarke like nothing has happened. They both insist on maintaining their diplomatic relationship- because they do seem to bring out the strength in each other- but as they talk Bellamy can see Clarke relaxing back into herself, like Lexa’s pack was removed directly from the pile on her shoulders.

The fires start to go out, and Lexa finally wishes Clarke a good night, a handshake, a word that means something like sister. As she turns to flip her hair back over her shoulder, she notices Bellamy sitting on the ground with his back against Clarke’s hut.

She looks at him with pity- like he’s an animal laying wounded in her forest.

“It’s not safe to sleep in the open,” she cautions. “The panthers hunt in this forest, you won’t see it coming.”

Bellamy scoffs and clicks the safety off of his rifle. He finds it hard to believe he won’t see a massive black cat coming.

“He’ll be fine.” Clarke says- and it doesn’t sound like actual faith, it sounds like one of those dismissals she makes when she’s trying to prove to Lexa that she’s capable of being a true leader.  That windstorm in his head echoes. _It’s worth the risk_

Lexa genuinely doesn’t give a shit if he’s eaten by a panther, she’d enjoy the victory of being right actually, so without another argument she disappears into her own hut. Bellamy stares off at the shadows dancing around the tree line until he hears Clarke sigh.

“I’m not leaving,” he says. “You can get as angry as you want. I don’t trust them, not when there’s only two of us.”

Trusting the Grounders will never come easy to him.

“Three,” she reminds him “Lincoln.”

He clicks the safety of his rifle on and back off. “Lincoln is a half at best,” he says- loud enough that Lincoln can probably hear from the hut next to Lexa’s, “He’s got a foot on both sides.”

“Really Bellamy?” she asks.

If in Lexa’s mind he’s a wounded animal- in Clarke’s he’s a little lost boy with a toy gun.

“I’ll be fine," he mumbles the words in annoyance. It’s enough to get her to close the rickety door and stop nagging him.

Two hours must pass, judging by the track of the moon in the sky. He’s heard a few strange noises, rustling leaves, snapping twigs, but he hasn’t been eaten alive yet. Sleep isn’t going to come easy - if it comes at all. Earth has taught him to be a light sleeper, the movement of a shadow in the corner of his eye is enough to startle him awake. He’s started looking for familiar constellations when he hears her calling his name.

“Bellamy,” she hisses quietly.

He doesn’t jump when he hears her voice- almost like he’s been waiting for it this whole time. “What?”

She hesitates for a second, long enough for him to turn his head and look at her. She’s paler in this light, almost ethereal. Her eyes are clouded over, more silver than blue: worry, not anger.

“Get in here.” she finally snaps.

He shakes all that nonsense about color and light from his head. “What?”

“Get in here,” she demands- as regal as ever, “Now.”

But he stays rooted in place, the butt of his gun digging into the ground. “I don’t take orders from you,” he reminds her with a scowl.

She steps out of the hut. “Come in here or I’ll come out there.”

“Go back to bed Clarke.” 

He’s not giving into her- because this is who he is, and this is the kind of shit he does, and it’s bad enough that Lincoln’s following him around talking about beautiful storms and destroyed homes, without giving him actual confirmation of accuracy of that ridiculous fucking metaphor. There needs to be boundaries between them, that much is becoming obvious. He needs to stay out here and she needs to stay in there- because they are equal but different, and they may need each other but a bit of distance will do them both some good. He’s the Guard Dog, not the Knight in Shining Armor. He is not fucking Lancelot. He’s not going.

“God, Bellamy just,” she takes a raspy breath, desperation and embarrassment flood her voice, “please.”

Fuck.

When he storms into her hut, he attempts to slam the door behind him, but all it does is drag slowly across the ground and he’s left looking like an idiot when he turns and sees Clarke shaking her head at him in the moon light. She’s laying on what looks like a straw mattress, although it only raises her a few inches off of the ground. The hut is even less impressive on the inside. He’s pretty sure he could extend his arms and touch either side at the same time.

“Here,” she finally says, tossing a black and white pelt in his face “So you don’t have to sleep in the dirt.”

The urge to make a smart ass comment is almost irresistible but she looks so fucking tired, she always looks so fucking tired, so he doesn’t say anything. He props his rifle against the wall and lays the pelt down a few inches from her spot. The moon is shining in his eyes when he lays back. Its unbearable- so he lays his arm across his face and tries to focus on the sounds of the wind outside.

“Sometimes I think you forget that you aren’t fucking invincible,” Clarke mumbles.

There’s a moment when he’s sure she has to be talking to herself (because he has that exact thought about her nearly every day) but when he pulls his arm back from his eyes he meets her glare, shining in his face almost as bright as the moonlight.

“Excuse me?” he says.

“You act like you and your rifle can take on the world. You’re just a man Bellamy, and you know what happens to men down here.”

_Just a little lost boy with a toy gun._

“If you’ve got a point make it,” he says, “because all the hypocrisy is giving me a goddamn headache.”

She sits up further. “Don’t you ever worry that eventually your luck is going to run out?”

He doesn’t even try not to get offended when she says shit like that- even though he knows it’s not really her intention. Especially not now when he’s already tired, and worried about Panthers and Grounders, and this ridiculous mission had fucked up his schedule for the last week.

“My luck?” he questions.

She rolls her eyes, “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t actually,” he says, “After everything I’ve survived, you want to boil it down to luck?”

She shakes her head. “You’re missing the point.”

“I don’t actually give a fuck about your point, Clarke.”

Finally, she sighs and turns away from him, throwing herself on her back and staring up at the ceiling. He fumes in the silence for a few minutes, glaring at her until it’s clear that she has no intentions of looking back at him.

“I won’t….” she stops, breathes. “You can’t die.”

It’s so quiet he almost mistakes her whisper for the wind, but her face is stubbornly turned away from him and her hand is clenched in a fist where it lays next to him.

Now he gets it. Why she was so pale and angry and practically stomping her foot until he was within her line of sight. Nightmares maybe? Maybe she hadn’t even fallen asleep at all.

He reaches out in the darkness until he can pry her fingers apart and then he stills, leaving his hand tangled in her smaller one. It’s cold and callused, but it’s familiar. 

She fights the same nightmares he does. She leads the way on the line they’re always walking, between being a hero and being a monster. She gets lost sometimes, the Princess that stood beside him all those many years ago when he really was just a little lost boy with a toy gun. That innocence she once had is buried under blood and stone and guilt, but when she squeezes his hand and lets her fingers relax into his, at least he knows she’s still alive in there.  
   
**...**  
   
Once- during those last few skirmishes of the war- Bellamy took a bullet to the side and didn’t tell anyone for two days.  
   
 It was a horrible bloody day, and after hours of arguing when he should have been recovering they agreed that dying from something as stupid as an infection was actually the worst way he could ever betray her.

It’s something he promised would never happen again. As she stands amongst council listening to him stammer through his report over their tiny two-way, she realizes that might be the biggest lie he’s ever told her.  
   
“Alright,” he says- the radio crackles. It’s the way he holds it, she keeps telling him it’s the way he holds it, “let me just,” he’s in pain, she can hear it in his voice, “I’ll just tell you before you hear it from someone else.”

And she knows what that means. Something has gone wrong. Something has gone so wrong that there’s a group headed back early, and Bellamy is not among them.

“Tell me what?” she prompts. She walks a little further from the group, under the guise of trying to improve the signal.

“I’ll be late,” he says. His simple words carry something through the speaker, amongst cracking of the static. It sounds a lot like obligation. It’s that short voice he uses when he’s forced to give inspection reports to the Council. _This is for you- not for me._

For all intents and purposes that’s what this is- a Captain’s report to a Councilwoman.

“Why?” she asks.

The radio grows warm in her hands- its weak battery catching a fever from overexertion. 

They aren’t far, that’s what Abby kept saying, _They won’t be far from us_ , but things like near and far don’t mean shit in limbo, an uncharted land without borders. It’s a thin little blank space to fill in on their map- but it’s still a blank space. Lexa’s people have no use for it, because it floods when the river runs high and it was awfully close to the Mountain- so for all they know, that blank space could be filled with landmines or warmongers or Cerberus the three headed fucking dog.

“Captain Blake,” she says- because it’s not Bellamy she’s talking to. This is diplomatic, this is procedural. It’s nothing like the Mountain. “There’s a lot going on here. We are on a tight schedule. Why will you be late?”

His voice drops, she can hear it before he even starts to speak, his breathing is labored. The radio clicks twice, and she knows he’s holding on too tightly again. “My leg,” he finally says- half whispers it, because he doesn’t want anyone else to know that he’s in pain. “I’m having trouble walking.”

She needs more. There’s a spark of panic in the deepest part of her gut and she needs more.  But she can’t speak- can’t ask for it, because if she opened her mouth now whatever came out would be Clarke talking to Bellamy.

“I was cut,” he says.

Then a deep breath, “Stabbed,” he corrects.

When she still doesn’t say anything and her eyes are squeezed shut so tight that she’s starting to see bright colors on the backs of her eyelids, he sighs so aggressively that it mingles with the static.

“There was an old trap out here,” he explains, “for bears or- it doesn’t matter. We didn’t see it, I didn’t see it. It sprung-“

Her own radio cracks, her fingers cramping at the knuckles as she tries to imagine having the strength to crush it into dust. 

She takes another step away from the other members of Council, turning her back to them completely. “Where the fuck are you?” she says, low and gravely, the way he’d say it if this was reversed.

She doesn’t know what kind of answer to expect, because there are no known markers out there, no point of reference for him to give her, but all he does is sigh again and the radio is so hot against her palm it might leave blisters.

“Calm down,” he says, “I’m fine.”

The idea that he believes he’s “fine” is fucking ridiculous. First of all, because Bellamy Blake would never just concede to not being able to walk unless the pain was unbearable. Second, because Clarke isn’t an idiot. She’s seen a fucking bear trap. She knows the damage it can do- and that’s not to mention the kind of infection you can pick up from being punctured by severely rusted metal.

“You’re not fine,” she hisses- bringing the radio closer to her mouth so she could lower her voice, “you’re bleeding out in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“Hey,” he says- louder than necessary, “I’m not bleeding out. I have this under control.”

And she should believe him. He’s a grown man, he has common sense, survival skills. She’s underestimating him. She’s not giving him the trust he deserves. She’s not treating this like a diplomat.

But it’s Bellamy. Bellamy is bleeding somewhere, and she can’t get to him. She doesn’t know where he is, or what the wound looks like, or how much blood he’s lost.  
All she knows is what it looks like when Bellamy Blake decides his own pain isn’t a priority- the paleness of fever, the dark stain of blood poisoning, and his apologies.

“Three of them are coming back- they’ll grab crutches, I’ll get some rest and be back by tomorrow night just like we planned,”

She’s hardly listening to him. Council is craning their necks and looking over at her, her mother’s eyes rest hard on the radio. Bellamy keeps telling her their plan, sounding almost theatrically confident. It feels like she can hear ticking, like a clock counting down the seconds until the radio dies, and then she’ll be stuck in that nightmarish river of uncertainty –drowning, swimming against the current of her own pessimism- at the mercy of whatever it is that pulls the strings down here.

“Clarke, listen to me,” he says, because he may be in no-man’s land, but he knows exactly where she is, “I’m alright.”

She doesn’t believe him.

“Councilwoman,” her mother calls out.

Clarke doesn’t even look back, she shakes her head once and leaves the tent- running a hand through her hair as she goes. This isn’t professional anymore- why pretend?

“You’re lying,” she says with a harsh slur- glaring at the sunset over the trees because would it be so unreasonable for it to just stick around until they figure all of this out? “This is what you do.”

The radio goes silent for a moment, and then it clicks twice, and he’s done speaking to Councilwoman Griffin. “Clarke,” his Captain’s tone has faded into a voice that makes her squeeze her eyes shut again- because it sounds like dirt roads and firesides and his hand in hers. _Who we are and who we need to be to survive._ “I don’t lie to you.”

She knows it. Logically, she knows that’s true. She knows that this is a mission they’ve been coordinating for months. She knows how important it is- how important he is. She’s been given control of this excursion- she’s been given the authority to extend it, to keep tabs on it, call it off if necessary. It’s important. It’s important for the expansion- for their peace of mind. She knows this-but right now, she’s still hearing echoes of his screams while they pulled that bullet out of him, so she doesn’t give a shit about any of it.

“You don’t take care of yourself,” she says, talking over the voice in her head yelling _hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite_ , “and we’re not risking loss of life, we’ve said that from the beginning. If there was one trap there will probably be others- I won’t risk it, and I certainly won’t have cadets running around under the supervision of a Commanding Officer who can’t even walk. ”

“We can salvage this,” he says, “it doesn’t need to change anything. It doesn’t change anything. I’m only telling you out of-“

“I’m sending them back with horses-“

“We’ve spent weeks planning this-“

“Captain Blake,” she says, “it’s over.”

He forgets to remove his finger from the button when he curses her. It doesn’t even make her flinch.

“Is that an order Councilwoman?” he asks.

She shakes her head without realizing that he can’t see it, that this time she’ll have to actually find the words. She raises the radio to her lips twice- interrupting the static, releasing it again.

“No,” she says, “No it’s not.”

It can’t be.

“But I- Bellamy I’m asking you to come home.”

He’ll still be pissed, but he won’t turn his back on her when she talks to him like that, when she uses words like home. She’s taking advantage of that- but he’ll live, and that’s what matters.

“Fuck it, fine.” he says. 

 An official report to Council will state that Captain Blake was injured and he didn’t want to risk the safety of others on the mission. No one would have to know that that wasn’t exactly true.

She can breathe easier- knowing he’d be back, and she could look at him and his bloody leg and know for sure that he was going to survive.

She can breathe easier, but there’s a horrible, bitter voice screaming from the great depths of her conscience.

_Love is weakness._


	3. Chapter 3

They still celebrate Unity Day.  
   
Chancellor Griffin makes a speech, Monty makes a batch of unsanctioned moonshine, Clarke insists that they invite the grounders (to celebrate unity between the sky people and the people of earth) so they have a feast and a fire twice the size of a normal day. 

People cling to their traditions, but it’s not the same. It can never be the same.

It’s about remembering now, remembering everyone they’ve lost.

Every year they build a memorial - a flat wooden platform where people can place a flower in memory of a loved one. The gates are opened; people wander to the meadow south of camp and return with armfuls of milkweed, daisies, creek plum, and bluebells. They knot the stems together, some kneel and pray, others just cry.

_May we meet again._

When the sun starts to set, and the memorial is a patchwork of wildflowers and weeds, they carry it to the river. The entire camp lines the bank in silence and watches as it floats along the rapids. Slowly the water pulls the flowers free. By the time the memorial is out of eyesight, the surface of the river is stained with color.

Clarke is the only one that sits and waits for every last flower to drift away.

Bellamy only knows because he has that nasty habit of keeping one eye on her at all times. That first year, she stood next to Lexa on the ridge and watched with pointed indifference. It was only after everyone had trickled back to camp that she climbed down and sat cross legged in the mud. He had gotten comfortable against a boulder a few dozen feet away, his gun slung across his shoulder. They didn’t say a word. 

It’s their own little tradition now. She sits next to the river in silence until it gets dark and then they both walk side by side back to camp. He’s gotten really good at resisting the urge to tell her that he meant it every time he said that she’d done the right thing.

He spends the rest of the night with O, with his people. There’s always an attempt to keep things light, to tell stories about Monty’s mishap with the still or the time Miller got stuck in those thorn bushes, but eventually everyone says what’s really on their mind. Jasper usually goes quiet around the time Mt. Weather is brought up. Raven goes to bed when someone finally mentions Finn. Clarke stays far away from it all, sitting by Lexa’s side until they leave for the night.

By early morning the camp is quiet. Clarke is the only one that sits and waits for the fire to burn down.

Just like every year, Bellamy sits as close to her as he can without having her look up and glare at him. Her jar is half empty where it sits between her feet. The night air is unusually cold.

“They’ll tell ghost stories about me one day,” she says through frosted lips and a breeze that carries the smoke into her eyes.

That’s when Bellamy knows it’s time to cut her off, when she starts talking about ghosts, or stars, or shadows. “You should get some sleep Clarke.”

She turns and looks at him, her eyes wide. There’s a part of him that wonders if she’s even talking to him when she says things like that. She always looks startled when he responds.

“What are you still doing here?” she asks weakly.

“Getting drunk,” he responds. _Things don’t feel right unless they’re standing on level ground._ “I think it’s time you call it a night.”

“One day we’ll be at war again,” she mumbles. Her gaze is drawn back to the fire, the chaos and heat and color, “and you’re going to regret being like this.”

He watches the flames himself- trying to see what she sees, “Being like what Clarke?”

“Being here Bellamy, always being here.”

Something is different about her tonight. She’s actually leaning towards him, like she used to. 

“Someone has to be.”

She laughs in a ridiculously self-deprecating way. “No they don’t. They really, really don’t.”

“Clarke,” he lets the liquid courage spark an argument they haven’t had in years, “did you even say a word to your mother today?”

She doesn’t respond, but she does kick her jar over so the remaining alcohol seeps into the ground. He knows it’s because she wants to answer him, she wants to talk to him and she’s trying to convince herself that it’s only because of her buzz. She’s wrong. Loneliness always catches up with you.

“This has to stop," he says- speaking to the darkness, "You keep driving this wedge between you and your family and it’s…”

“My family?”

“Our people, Clarke,  _your family_. The ones we both bled for.”

“They’re alive,” she says. “Isn’t that all that matters?”

“What about you?”

“I make sure they stay that way.”

“By yourself?”

She looks up at him and holds his gaze for what feels like hours. “Things are finally going well, why do you have to question…”

“Because like it or not I give a fuck what happens to you, even if you don’t extend me the same courtesy.”

There it is: the bitterness, the anger that’s laid dormant since she handed him that map of Mt Weather, the frustration of being a man who would take a bullet for someone who spends her days actively trying not to care about him.

“You’re the only person in this camp that I trust,” she says defensively. “I care about what you think Bellamy.”

“Yeah,” he scoffs, “that’s not the same thing.”

Her legs shake as she shoots to her feet and the moonshine isn’t strong enough to mask the smell of guilt when she storms past him, but he doesn’t care. He sits - pissed off and drunk on his log - until something howls in the distance. The sky is at its darkest, but that just means it’ll be dawn soon. He’ll have to be up and on duty. 

He makes a point to stomp on the jar Clarke left laying by the fire before he goes. It’s childish, but seeing it break makes the walk back to his shack a little easier, especially when his bad ankle starts to throb. 

He’d sleep it off. He’d sleep all of this off. He’s been doing that for years.

The problem with that, as per usual, is Clarke; because Clarke Griffin, inebriated or pin straight sober, doesn’t know how to back down. She needs the last word, needs it or she’ll lose even more sleep than she already does. So of course when he stumbles through the door, looking forward to the darkness of his quarters, he finds a lantern lit and that problem sitting cross legged on his bed.

“I need you to understand,” she says - in the most diplomatic voice she can muster with breath that is probably flammable.

“You’re drunk Clarke.” And when he says it, he feels like he’s saying it to himself too. It takes him three tries to pry his boot from his aching foot and all the while she stares at him.

“Bellamy,” she pleads.

“You don’t owe me an explanation. I really don’t care.” He shucks his pants next and then his shirt. Clarke is staring down at her hands.

“Don’t you think this whole thing would be easier if that were true?”

“Yeah, you know what I do,” he’s trying to keep himself from yelling, but his head is spinning and everything she’s saying is only making it worse, “but that’s not how these things work. That’s not the way life works.” He blows out the lantern and walks past her to the other side of his half-assed mattress. She’s quiet when he settles into bed, turning his back to her and pulling viciously at the blankets she’s sitting on top of until they wrap around him.

When she finally sighs, he remembers that she likes to speak in the darkness. She likes to tell him things and expects him to pretend like he never heard them. She’s honest in the dark. He’d love moments like this if they didn’t make her seem so uncharacteristically vulnerable. 

“People that I love die,” she says bluntly.

“People die Clarke. Doesn’t matter how you feel about them.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m trying to be a leader. I’m trying to be stronger than I was when we got down here.”

“Yeah, well you’re not.”

“So why are you still here?”

He turns to face her, shifting the blankets with so much force that she slams both of her hands down to keep her balance. She’s looking at him over her shoulder. He’s not sure how much she can actually see in the darkness and that makes it easier. The blue of her eyes is dulled. Her form just a shadow. He’s really starting to understand why it’s so easy for her to be herself in the dead of night. “Because the person you were when we got down here was important to me.”

She makes this horrible defeated sound, the way a soldier would sigh after returning to a battlefield he almost died on. Then she’s pushing her legs out in front of her and leaning with her back against his chest. He feels that brotherly instinct to comfort shooting through his arms, but he waits in the silence and listens to her breathe.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

But he does. He owes her for so much and the fact that she’s forgotten that is so frustrating that it almost makes him angrier. But she starts to scoot forward, like she’s about to wander back to her own bed, and he doesn’t want it to be like this anymore. He doesn’t want her to be so goddamn far away from him all of the time. So he allows his arm to break free of the blanket and wrap itself around her waist, drawing her back until she’s lying on her side, pressed up against him. His hand lays heavy against her hip, keeping her in place. He’s waiting for her to fight him on this, the way she fights him on everything, but she only sinks into him further, so much that he has to move her hair out of his face to speak.

“Bellamy-“

“Go to sleep.”

She’s a storm trapped in a woman’s body- and maybe, somehow, his arms can offer her some kind of comfort. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. 

“You don’t know that.” Her hands squeeze his wrist where he grips her waist. 

“I do,” he promises, “I’m not going to leave you.”

“Not your decision.” She moves farther back- her body spread out evenly in front of him. “I do give a fuck about what happens to you,” she says- her words muffled as she speaks them into the gap of her bent arm. “You’re my best friend.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be- just, go to sleep.”

He remembers a story about a beach after a hurricane and closes his eyes. In a matter of minutes he can hear her soft snores. He falls asleep just about the time she pulls away from him, his hand laying in the empty space between them. When he wakes up she’s gone.

They’ll never speak of that night and he knows it.  
...

 

Octavia gives birth in the Summer.

It’s on a Wednesday- maybe- as if that kind of thing matters here. There’s a breeze blowing across camp, warm and soured by the sun. The fabric of Bellamy’s pants sticks to his legs as he paces back and forth amongst their jagged piles of lumber. Technically he’d been given the afternoon to “rest” after a heated encounter with Marcus Kane’s favorite new little mouth-breather who had been inconspicuously following him around in order to prove that “Actually Capitan Blake you don’t always have the safety on your rifle, and if you don’t, then your men don’t. We’ll need to start addressing this in order to promote our new safety procedures. I’m sure the committee will insist.”

He’s had it with committees and councils and the quicksand pit that is post-apocalyptic government, so he told him to fuck off. That was – apparently- interpreted as him being “overstressed” and thus “uncooperative.” 

Basically it’s a bad day that spirals off into an afternoon of chaos, and it all starts with Clarke.

She finds him there in the lumber yard. Her hair is swept messily to one side, there are dark stains around the collar of her shirt. She walks towards him with so much aggression that he’s pretty sure he can see the piles of wood shaking as she passes them.

There’s a part of him- deep down in that darkness where only instinct exists- that starts pulling on his battle armor, flipping the safety off of his fucking rifle. If she’s storming down here to chastise him, because it’s hot and the air is stale, and she has nothing else to be angry about, then she’s going to get a lot more than she’s prepared for. He’s been saving up. He’s got at least two weeks of little comments archived in the back of his mind.

But before he can start cursing at her- and he is preparing to initiate this conversation by asking her just what the fuck her problem is, she’s pulling the axe out of his hand. 

"Go talk some sense into your sister," she demands. Her finger points out towards the North side of camp, her other hand clamps around the handle of the ax.

She's wearing his boots again.

 "Whatever the fuck is going on between you two- I don’t want anything to do with it,” he says. He’s been burned before- taking one side over the other.

 "She's in labor," Clarke snaps, " has been for a couple of hours. Did you know that?"

 There's a ripping sensation in his gut- a horrible mutation of fear and excitement and the harsh realization that this is actually going to happen. His little sister is going to be a mother. If she survives.

 Clarke only grows more irritated with his hesitation. "What the hell is wrong with your family-"

 "Whoa," he says- waving his hand, "calm down. I had no idea she was in labor, where is she-"

 "Where is she?" she repeats- almost hysterically, "she's preparing for her journey back to Ton DC!"

 It’s not surprising, not really, but his mouth does fall open in shock. Another instinct bubbles up in that deep down darkness, one that belongs to a stubborn little boy who resents the only person in the world he cares about because she makes him afraid, a boiling pocket of fury that infects his bloodstream and turns his vision red. The one shaky voice that tells him she’s doing it on purpose, _“She’s making dangerous choices just to hurt you.”_

He knows how to ignore that voice now. He’s learned to breathe through that initial rush of rage- but it doesn’t fade entirely. He squeezes his eyes shut but he can still feel it, grating against his skin like the heat.

"She's fucking what?!"

 Clarke seems satisfied now, now that she's dragged him into fury. Maybe that's where they're both most comfortable. 

 "Get her," she says- starting to walk backwards, "She's telling everyone she doesn't want to give birth here- but its too late for that."

The warm breeze blows between them again, makes everything worse.

 "She doesn't want to give birth here?" he repeats. "Where the fuck-"

 "I don't know," Clarke argues, "I don't understand her. All I know is that her contractions are at least ten minutes apart and we have no idea how fast this can go from this point on. Go get her. Carry her to medical if you have too. I'm having someone prep a bed."

She takes the ax with her, maybe without even thinking about it, maybe to speed things along in medical. Without a weight in his hands, they start to shake. She's given him something to do- something to do in a situation that's completely out of his control. He can focus on that. He can focus on one thing at a time. Go get Octavia, get her to medical.

And then stand by and watch because there’s absolutely nothing he can do to make this easier for her.

She’s by the horses, her face as close to Lincoln’s as possible so they can argue without the people around them hearing. She’s got one foot on the stirrup, Lincoln is gripping her waist- her whole body looks unbalanced and sweaty. Her eyes are pinched together like she fighting off a headache.

She pushes Lincoln away, and he goes- takes two giant steps back as she leans against the horse’s side and groans loudly. Another contraction.

Lincoln sees him first. He almost trips over the man’s feet when he reaches out to grab him by the arm and speak into his ear, "I'm trying," he says, "she's being unreasonable."

 Bellamy shakes him off, counts the breaths his sister takes as he approaches her. 

 "O," he says.

 She glances up and narrows her eyes, mumble something that sounds like "That bitch."

 "Let's go, Clarke is getting-“ 

 She dodges the arm he’d reached out towards her. "I'm not having my baby here,” she says, “we’ve talked about this. We’re leaving today just like we planned.”

They had talked about it. They’d also argued about it, screamed about it, and gotten so pissed off about it that they didn’t speak for almost two weeks. Octavia had a lot of faith in her Grounder family and whatever the hell it is they do. She kept arguing that it was more natural, that it would be less stressful. Bellamy- admittedly with Clarke in his ear- didn’t really give a shit about what was or wasn’t natural. The equipment and medical staff they had here in camp would make it safer. _That_ is what mattered, that’s the only thing that mattered.

 "Octavia-"

 "I'm not!” she yells, whipping around to face him, “Not after everything they've done."

 The sun flashes across her eyes in a perfect imitation of the way the bright lights of the ARK had done every time Bellamy had to shut her away- and for the first time in a long time she looks scared, unsure, out of place.

 "Look at me,” he says. “You need to do what's best for this baby and you know that, even if you’re scared-"

 She lets out a laugh, "Bellamy- I'm- I'm fucking terrified."

 "Sure,” he says, the shaking in his hands is getting worse. “You can do this Octavia. You can and you will, but you’ve got to do it here. It doesn’t matter what you want. It’s not about you anymore.”

She stares at him- her lonely older brother, the defeated King, the somber warrior- and finds whatever it is she used to find when she looked at him. For a second they are back on the ARK, best friends in a world so tiny she could barely stretch her legs out. She understands him when they connect like this. Everything that’s happened on the ground fades into a big green blur and he’s eleven years old falling asleep with a groaning stomach because she’d been so hungry that night. It’s all whites and blacks. The only colors she knows come from him. He gives her everything – his bread, his water, his time, his life. He’d die for her. 

She understands.

Clarke is right. It goes quickly after that. She’s still a furious mess when they arrive- but someone has taken the ax from her. She’s got a bed in the corner of Medical, turned to the side to make room for the people in thick white scrubs that surround her.

It’s fine. He’s fine.

And then she starts screaming.

 Within five minutes, they attempt to kick him out of the room. He doesn’t fucking go- because as much as they want to pretend like he’s just an emotional liability he has seen this before. He fucking delivered Octavia- he knows this isn’t right. He can hear it in her screams, something is wrong. He tries to ask nicely, and when no one answers- he starts yelling.

They force him out, backing him up until he has to crane his head to see her. “Captain Blake, please step outside until you can control your-“

“I am not leaving her-“

“This is a chaotic situation and I’m afraid you’re only making it worse.”

“I’m not fucking leaving!”

“Bellamy,” Clarke is letting Octavia curse at her- grip her arm the same way she's gripping Lincoln's. She looks over at her shoulder and nods towards the door. 

 "No," he mouths.        
                                        
 She shakes her head and turns back to the bed, "Octavia, don't push yet- wait until they-"

 "Fuck you Clarke!" she says, "I want this done- I want- UGH."

 "Obviously something is wrong," Bellamy starts to rant. Clarke pulls her arm way from Octavia and crosses the tiny space to get to him.

“Don’t fight,” Octavia says as she tries to catch her breath, “the last fucking thing I want to hear right now is your sexual tension.”

They both ignore her. Bellamy tries to step back around the doctor, but Clarke lightly pushes his shoulder towards the sheet of plastic separating this corner from the rest of medical. "You can't handle this," she says harshly, "there's nothing you can do, you don't want to see it."

 Bellamy's eyes are wide, "Fuck you Clarke, I-"

 "Step outside," she says, "trust me, just step outside." There’s a layer of panic in her voice. He thinks about how well she knows him, and how bad would it have to be for her to ask him to abandon his sister when she’s in so much pain.

"What is it?" he asks, “what’s wrong?”

Behind them Octavia starts to scream again- there are more shouts of “don’t push” muffled by the white scrubs and face guards. The set Clarke is wearing is much too big for her, but he can still see the outline of her chest rise and fall- uneven and shallow.

She takes a step towards him and lowers her voice. "The baby is breach- hey, stop-  Bellamy look at me- that means this is going to get complicated. I'm asking you to step outside because this is a small area and when you start swinging you're going to hit someone important."

His head is in his hands- crouched down so Clarke blocks him from Octavia’s view. She can’t see him like this- she can’t see him.

 "How can they fix it?" he asks- digging his fingernails into his palm.

 Clarke lets him hide in her shadow. "We're going to try to turn the baby- but it's going to be hard."

 He breathes deep once, twice, and stands back up to his normal height. "I'm not leaving her,"

 "Of course you're not,” she says, “But there are too many people in here-"

 "Then _you_ leave-" he snaps- much louder than he should, so loud that Octavia hears him.

"Bellamy," she calls, "You're scaring them, just- wait outside, right outside the door, where I can hear you."

She’s panting, Lincoln is bent over next to her- his forehead against her hand, praying maybe- or trying not to get kicked out himself.

 "O-"

 "Please,” she says, “please, I just want this to be over."

The only thing in the world that could have made him leave that room was hearing her voice- broken and pleading. He can’t make this any harder on her. He can’t be the one to make this anymore stressful. So he swallows all of his bad feelings and curses, and criticisms, and questions and steps back into the doorway.

 "I'll be right here,” he swears.

 "Right there," she says with an exhausted nod, "right outside the plastic."

 "Do you want me to leave?" Clarke asks.

 Octavia shakes her head- sits up to prepare for another contraction. "No, you're the only one in this room being honest."

She’d heard every word Clarke had said and Bellamy almost smirked because that was probably her intention after all since the medical staff was doing everything they could to “keep the mother from panicking.”

“Councilwoman,” one of the white-clad half robots snaps  “if you’re going to stay, you’ll need to actually assist.”

 She starts to back away, but he reaches out and grabs her around the arm. "If I call your name,” he says, “if I ask a question, you answer me," he tells her.

 "Always."

 It takes another three hours. Bellamy is left to pace back and forth behind the plastic wall while the shadow of his sister screams in agony. He can’t make out what anyone else is saying- because it’s muffled and they’re all talking over each other. Octavia calls out for him sometimes, once even joking “Bell, bored yet?”

He tries to laugh, promises her he’s not going anywhere- that if she just says the word he’ll be right there by her side.

Clarke does answer him- even if he has to call her name a few times. She narrates it- for everyone really. “They’re turning the baby now. It’s okay, I think it’s working. You just have to hold out Octavia. Hey- I know you’re tired, sit up.”

“She okay?”

“Yes,” they both say.

It’s not okay though. Bellamy isn’t okay. This is unimaginable torture for him- and that’s a bold fucking statement because he’s experienced actual torture.

“Clarke,” he says- after another twenty minutes of nothing but whispered arguments and Octavia sobbing, “Clarke you’ve gotta-“

But he’s cut off, “Push Octavia! Push, you have to keep going, push.”

He can hear the other doctors, Lincoln, Octavia is grunting and cursing and swearing. There’s a few panicked shouts. Lincoln starts saying her name – desperately, almost like he’s trying to wake her. Clarke joins in. Bellamy’s stomach is plummeting to the ground. He’s going to rip this fucking plastic down, rip it down and rip everyone that stands in his way into fucking shreds.

And then he hears a baby cry.

 It’s such a fucking beautiful sound that hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end- a wave of relief crashes over him, and he laughs to himself. She did it. His little sister is a mother.

“Octavia,” Lincoln says, “Octavia look at me,”

“Wake her up,”

“Octavia!”

“Clarke what’s wrong?” Bellamy demands.

“Octavia, stop- Lincoln breathe, Hey Octavia- open your eyes. No you have to open your eyes. Just a little bit more. We need just a little bit more. You can do this, you have to keep fighting.”

“Someone get Dr. Griffin, I think she’s hemorrhaging.”

“OCTAVIA. WAKE. UP!”

Everything goes blurry. He tries to get to her. Tries to push everyone out of his way because being by her side is an instinct he’ll never be able to shake.

“What is going on?” he pulls the plastic back just as more people flood the area. Alarms are going off- but not really. He can hear them in his head, in the footsteps around him, and Clarke’s yelling. 

They ignore him until he starts pushing doctors out of the way, and then Clarke’s hand is wrapped around his arm and Abby Griffin is there pointing at the doorway and a couple of his guys start pulling him away from his sister. He fights them until his arms feel weak, vows to hate the Griffins forever for making him leave. He curses and cries and screams until the guards - his fucking men - deposit him on the ground just outside the shell of the exodus ship.

People have noticed the commotion, but no one has approached him. He can see Raven and Jasper at a distance, whispering to each other with worry on their faces. They keep their distance, because they understand him. He doesn’t want pats on the back or words of encouragement. He wants to hit something, to blame something or someone for this. He wants to save her. He wants - he just needs her to be okay.

He fists his hair and tries not to scream. He doesn’t want to cry in front of these people, he’s never cried in front of anyone other than Octavia and Clarke, but he can’t even fucking breath his chest is so tight and his eyes are burning.

45 minutes pass. 45 minutes that feel like six years to Bellamy, who is pacing so frantically that even the armed guards take a step back from him. The first thing he sees is Clarke. She walks out through the terminal and stops dead when she sees him. She’s covered in blood and she’s crying.

He feels his whole world end when he looks at her. He’s half way to his knees when Lincoln comes rushing out behind her.

“Bellamy,” he says through deep breaths and tears “she’s okay. She’s alive. She-”

In three strides he’s hugging the man more fiercely than he’s ever hugged anyone. Lincoln keeps saying that she’s okay. Bellamy needs to see her to really believe it, and their son - they have a son now.

“They’re cleaning him up,” Lincoln says before Bellamy can ask, “so she can hold him when she wakes.”

“Can I see her? Them?”

She still looks pale as she sleeps, but Bellamy watches the steady rise and fall of her chest and he swears he can see the color come back into her cheeks with every breath. Lincoln insists that he hold his nephew, even if Bellamy felt that it was only right that Octavia get to hold her son first. He’s small, much smaller than Bellamy expected given that Lincoln is like a damn mountain. He looks so much like Octavia did that his breath catches and suddenly he’s five years old again, making a promise that this fucking planet has tried so many times to force him to break.

“Did you decide on a name?”

Lincoln shakes his head. “She said she had to see him first.”

She finally gets to see him when she wakes up hours later - just before the sun sets. She cries when Lincoln places the baby in her arms, and when he presses a kiss to her forehead, and when Bellamy grabs her hand and squeezes it until she looks into his eyes and he can finally see - for real - that she is alive.

When she decides on a name, she whispers it into Lincoln’s ear and they refuse to tell Bellamy. Apparently there’s some grounder tradition with a naming ceremony and a bunch of other archaic things that seem ridiculous to him, but Octavia is beaming. She looks so alive that he almost can’t believe that just hours ago she’d been on the brink of death.

Her doctors come in and out, and she thanks each one of them, especially Abby. They agree that it’s best to hold other visitors until the morning so Octavia and the baby can get some rest. Bellamy plants himself in a chair next to her - because he has no intentions of going anywhere - until Octavia cocks her head to the side and asks him where Clarke is.

He had been so wrapped up in everything that he’d forgotten what she’d looked like that afternoon. She had been crying, seriously crying in a way he hadn’t seen her cry in years.

“She left,” he says lamely, “right before they said you were okay. She left.”

Things had been tense between Clarke and Octavia for a long time. The warrior side of his sister understood that Clarke had always done what was best for their people, but the idealist, the little girl that listened to the bedtime stories Bellamy told her, the young woman who chased butterflies, that part of Octavia that was innately good all the way to her core would never really forgive Clarke. Bellamy understood that, he understood that that was how a lot of people felt about Clarke. They gave her weary smiles and nodded in respect when she walked through camp, but it was different than the way they looked at him or Abby or Kane. He knew deep down that Clarke never expected anyone to forgive her for everything that happened during the war, especially Bellamy. It was probably half of the reason she was still walking around like a ghost. 

“Bell,” Octavia says, pulling him from his thoughts. “Go find her.”

He nods, squeezes her hand, and stands up. Clarke is family. She is a part of his family and this is the best thing that has ever happened to his family. He wants her to be with them. She needs to be.

People congratulate him when he walks by. He smiles and shakes some hands, but those that really know him can see the determined look in his eye. His feet carry him through camp and his eyes scan the faces of everyone around him. It was unlikely that Clarke would be out eating dinner or celebrating with the masses. He just hopes to God she didn’t find another weak spot in the fence around camp. If he has to stumble through those woods in the dark, he’s going to end up getting pissed off and that’s really not how he wants this night to end.

He makes it to her quarters in record time- with steps lighter than he ever thought possible.

“Clarke,” he calls out as he raps his knuckles on the metal once and walks in.

She doesn’t turn, he can see the outline of her elbows bending as she wipes at her face and arranges her hair.

“Yeah?” she says- muffled, like she’s speaking from another universe. She sniffles and tries to pass it off as a cough, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He grins, despite the fact that she’s clearly upset, he can’t help but grin. “Everything is fine,” he says- and means it, “O is doing fine, the baby is- the baby is perfect.”

Finally she turns around, running her hand through her hair one last time to keep it out of her eyes. For a few seconds whatever she’s going through is written all over her face in perfect, miserable cursive. It’s almost enough to wipe away his smile- but then their eyes meet, the earth and the sky, and her whole body locks up. She looks at him like he’s just come back from the dead- not fear, but shock and curiosity. And he’s starting to get worried, until something breaks. She lets out a laugh, as sharp and abrupt as shattering glass, and smiles at him.

He thought he’d seen the light in her before- but no smile has ever looked this bright.

“You’re an Uncle,” she says- almost shaking her head in disbelief.

Hearing her say it is some kind of confirmation he didn’t even know he was waiting for. His grin doubles- so much that it makes his cheeks sting. He nods, and lets out a laugh just as unexpected as hers.

Next thing he knows, she’s right in front of him, standing on her tiptoes to press her lips against his cheek in that way that always meant goodbye, only this time- instead of disappearing- she wraps her arms around his middle and presses her face into his chest.

It’s an instinct now, shielding her, so he covers her with his arms and pulls her those last few inches until she’s completely pressed against him.

He can feel her breathe through his shirt, it’s shaky.

“You deserve this,” she mumbles. She breathes in deep and clears her throat again, “You do, you deserve this.”

Then his shirt is wet.

“Clarke,” he says- trying to pry her away.

She keeps trying to hide- pulling back so her forehead rests against his chest. Her eyes stare at the ground, her arms still locked around him.

“Hey,” he says again- this time a bit more forcefully, “look at me.” He spreads his hands across the sides of her face, his thumbs resting just in front of her ears, and guides her face up. 

The ice has melted in her eyes, spilled out a bit into her eyelashes, but she’s still got that smile and it grows when she looks at him. She bites her lip, raises her hand to trace the corner of his unshakeable grin. She shakes her head, lets out one little burst of laughter, “Look at you.”

He’s never seen a look like that before- because she’s staring at him with something that glows like pride but feels ridiculously warm. And Clarke Griffin, who has pieces of her broken heart scattered all around this place, actually looks happy- genuinely, uncontrollably happy. It’s the smile of a girl who spent years wishing on stars- and finally got to see one come true.  It’s not his Clarke- not the woman he’d followed into battle, not the one he’d been standing beside for years, not even the Princess that had stumbled out of the Dropship. This was some new, blinding, relieved, thankful, proud, beautiful face that he’s sure she’s never shown anyone.

And it’s for him.

So it’s mostly reflexive when his smile fades away. His skin is burning and his fingers tense up. It’s like he’s standing on a new planet all over again. The ground is falling out from under him, and he needs her- needs whatever this is- to keep him from plummeting. He moves his thumbs back and forth, the rest of his fingers tangle in her hair. He gives her a few seconds to pull away from him, but she seems just as disoriented as he is- looking up at him and barely breathing.

She’s as close to him as she can possibly be, her hands are gripping his shoulders, but when he ducks his head down and brushes his lips against hers- the ground falls out from under him anyway.

He squeezes his eyes shut and breaths against her- trying to remember what it felt like to have never done this. She wants to say something, maybe wants to shut it down, but when she opens her mouth their lips touch again and this time he doesn’t pull back.

He kisses her, holds her face in place and presses his lips against hers until he feels her press back. He gives her control, lets her lead the way he knows she has to. Up on her toes, dragging her tongue over his bottom lip, making a noise so ridiculously attractive when he brushes his thumb over her pulse point that he almost loses control of his hand entirely.

There’s an urge- one he’s really struggling to control- to grab her under the knees and fall back into her bed and spend the next however many hours pretending they’re different people in a different world- but Clarke pulls away to take a deep breath and when he tries to chase her lips she smiles at him again.

“You deserve this,” she repeats. This time though, there’s a bit of sadness fraying its edges. She goes back down to the flats of her feet and catches her breath against his shirt. Bellamy presses his lips against her forehead and tries to do the same.  
   
 “Is this something we should talk about?” he asks her.

“No,” she says, “we’re both delirious.”

He laughs, “You wouldn’t know how to be delirious.”

“I’m living vicariously through you.”

It’s quiet again- except for heartbeats.

“You could have that you know,” he says- without really knowing which “that” he’s talking about, a family, a child, him, “if you wanted it.”

Maybe she considers it, but a few seconds later she’s pushing away from him, smiling her diplomatic smile. “I don’t think it’s about what I want anymore, Bellamy.”


	4. Chapter 4

The river is shouting again.

Swollen with the heavy rains from the week before, it roars at them. It’s banks are under a foot or so of water- which means they walk on an incline through the trees to follow it.

“We should come back,” Monty says from somewhere behind her, “maybe in a week or so when the conditions are better.”

“It blooms after rain,” their guide Mel replies, her accent is thick and her pace is determinately quick. Clarke envies her. It’s almost like the trees around her are invisible the way she glides around them. “You won’t find it again.”

And that's all Clarke needs to hear really- whether or not this plant could actually be used for pain management didn't matter. She had to try.

“Clarke, this isn’t why we came out here,” Monty insists. 

She ignores him- focuses on the back of Mel’s head and her attempt to keep up with the ten year old walking just a few steps ahead of her. Mel’s niece- a girl Clarke had actually criticized Lexa about. She’d been in training since she was seven. _Seven._ Already her arms and legs were strong with muscle. Every couple of steps she’d glance back at Clarke and smile.

There weren’t many grounders that smiled at her. 

“It’s an adventure,” Clarke finally said.

Monty- and the three guards Bellamy had insisted accompany them for “training purposes” all seemed to groan at the same time.

“We’re scouting,” she reminds them, “If the terrain is a little rough-“

“I think it’s the raging fucking river that we’re apprehensive about,” Oliver Shi mumbles. 

He’s one of Bellamy’s favorites. The time they’d been spending together is evident by the number of times Clarke has heard him mumble a variant of the word ‘fuck’. 

“Feel free to head back,” Clarke says- because it’s what she would have said to _him_ if he were here. 

“We will rest soon,” Mel promises, “there will be a small clearing just beyond this grove of trees.”

“You know Clarke,” Shi continues, “I’m starting to think everything they say about you might be true.”

 _Councilwoman_ Bellamy corrects from somewhere inside of her head. 

For the hundredth time since they’d started this trip, she wonders bitterly how he can manage to be here without actually being here. She can hear his voice in the back of her mind, his footsteps behind her every time his men take a step. There’s a weight against the side of her thigh, his knife, the one she’d taken from his quarters and replaced with her own because she’d had this desperate compulsion to take something of his along and leave something of hers behind.

She regrets that now.

The look on his face when he’d caught her- like he’d defeated her. “What the fuck are you doing Griffin?”

Smug. He was smug about everything these days- mostly that’s because he’s happy and he looks at her and thinks he sees happiness too. It’s not real though, it’s not her happiness, it’s just the ghost of his, a shimmer that had clung to her skin after they….after the day the baby was born. 

“You aren’t going with me,” She’d told him, standing in his shadowed room with his knife in her back pocket. And he’d just smirked, smirked and nodded as if this wasn’t an argument they’d had so many times that it was practically choreographed.

“I know,” he’d said, “I’m sending three of my guys-“

“Of course you are.”

“They need the training,”

“And you want someone to babysit me.”

“Do you need a baby sitter?”

She hadn’t noticed until then how close they were- he’d taken a step towards her every time he’d opened his mouth. Maybe she’d done the same. However they had gotten there, he was close enough to pull her own knife from the front pocket of her pants. She was going to leave it for him anyway, that had been the plan all along- but Bellamy was good at fucking up her plans. 

“Eye for an eye Princess,” he’d said- looking down at her with that same ridiculous grin. 

All she could think to say was “Stop looking at me like that.” 

And his face had crinkled up in amused frustration, like he’d just gotten her to admit to something. “That’s what this is huh? You running away?”

She’d denied it up and down- would still if someone else suggested it- but he wasn’t exactly wrong. She needed a break from him- from this ridiculous illusion of happiness. 

The baby was wonderful. He was healthy and adorable and looked just like Clarke imagines Octavia looked. Bellamy loves that little boy so much that watching them together sometimes makes Clarke’s face feel warm. 

He should have that one day- logically, it’s clear that it’s something he’d want. He’d be good at it- he loves in this, crazy heavy magnificent way and she’s always sort of known that about him.

The thing about it is, the reason it’s so hard to look at him right now, is because he won’t ever get it.

They’d chosen their paths when they got here- jagged, foggy uphill battles that just so happen to intertwine with each other. She’s accepted that her path is probably going to drop off suddenly, it’s the nature of the job. She and Bellamy’s lives are dedicated to improving the lives of others. She likes it that way, deep down he probably does too.

They’ve both loved and lost enough to know not to love again. 

But if anyone deserves that stupid little dream of a family and cute little house and a smiling baby it’s Bellamy Blake. 

She can’t face the injustice of it – and partly that’s because she knows that one of the biggest reasons he’ll never have that is her, whatever it is about her that makes him want to walk alongside her right towards that drop off, whatever it is that makes him look at her the way he’s been looking at her.

 _You did kiss me_ , his voice says, _or are you just pretending like that never happened?_

“Shut. The Fuck. Up.” She mumbles- just as if he’s standing right behind her.

“You are hurt?” 

Clarke’s head snaps up just as they break through the tree line. The little girl, Dena, is looking up at her. She doesn’t speak much basic English – she’d been pretty quiet the entirety of their journey. Now that her Aunt has rushed ahead to assess the clearing they plan to “rest” in, she’s looking at Clarke like she’s waiting for some epic story. 

“No,” Clarke says, “I’m alright.”

Monty and their guards push past her when she slows down. The two Grounder men who were accompanying them pass as well, one ruffling Dena’s hair as he does. She stays at Clarke’s side- even as her Aunt starts calling out in Trigedasleng. 

“You are a warrior?” she speaks slowly- unsure.

“Yes,” Clarke says – she takes her water-skin from her pack.

“From the sky?”

Clarke glances up as if to remind herself and then nods.

“Will you go back?”

She follows her over to a rock- just along the fading bank of the river. Somewhere behind them Monty is complaining about having to rest in four inches of mud. Clarke ignores him. She watches the girl climb onto the rock across from hers. Her hair is braided and tied back- like Lexa used to wear it. Her face is clear of paint- but Clarke can practically see it reflecting on the skin already. She’s chosen her path as well- or someone else has chosen it for her.

“We can’t go back,” Clarke says, “and we don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing there.”

“Nothing?”

Clarke thinks of darkness, thick glass, bright hallway lights, and stale air.

“Nothing,” she confirms.

Dena glances over at the water- with a foot she kicks a few stray pebbles into it. They disappear instantly. It’s such a small thing, but it’s eerie, the way they disappear. 

“You like it here?” she asks.

Clarke nods without even really thinking about it. “I do.”

“Why?”

“Because things happen here” she says, “ they grow, they change. It’s an adventure.”

“Adventure?” she repeats uncertainly.

“This journey,” Clarke explains, “this is an adventure- because we’re going somewhere new.”

She nods excitedly, “I have never seen this….. part…. of the river.”

Clarke looks back at it and agrees.

“I like it,” Dena explains, “because it is beautiful but it can kill. That is what a warrior is.”

“You’re right,” she says, “it is beautiful.”

They talk for a few more moments- Clarke tells her about the small waterfall they had found once. Dena tells her about the time she had found some tiny cats near an old well. Everything seems to grow quiet- except for the river, though it dulls to background noise, humming almost in the same way the lights did up on the ARK.

“What will do you when we go home?” Dena asks. She’s standing now- balancing on her rock and craning on her toes to look over to the other side of the river.

Clarke expects Bellamy’s voice to bleed back through into her mind- but instead she smiles at the girl. She knows her path. She knows what she’ll do tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that. Every day until her path drops off. 

“Do it again,” she says, “I’ll find another adventure.”

 “Where?” Dena asks- turning around quickly to look at her, “On the other side of the river? In the mountains?”

“Everywhere.”

“Can I come?” she asks. “Will you show me the….. waterfall?”

She stumbles over the word, but looks so excited that Clarke can’t help but smile back. “I can,” she says, “and when you’re older you can come on as many adventures as you want.”

“I don’t need to wait,” she says, “I am older.”

“You have to be taller,” Clarke says- humoring her while she turns and glances to assess how much rest her people are actually getting. It would be nice to make the rest of this journey without whining. “It’s easier to climb mountains when you’re taller- hey watch the edge.”

She’s perched onto the end of the rock- almost like she’s trying to prove how tall she can be. 

She mumbles something that sounds like “I’m fine.”

“If you fall in, I can’t swim,” Clarke says.

Dena turns around with wide eyes, “You have to swim!”

“Not in that.”

“Dena!” her Aunt yells.

It happens so quickly it’s almost as if the universe had rehearsed it. As her Aunt called out, Dena had jumped and turned to answer her. Her left foot- which had been the closest to the water, slipped forward. The front of the rock was slick and wet, as she turned and her weight shifted – she jolted backwards. Her chin made contact with the rock before the weight of the rest of her body pulled her into the river. For one brief second Clarke’s eyes focused on the tiny pinprick of blood she’d left behind.

“DENA!”

Mel’s voice shakes every bone in Clarke’s body. It’s the most terrifying, devastated scream she’s ever heard. And that instant of pure horror suspends everything but the urge to grab the girl. 

“CLARKE DON’T!”

She hits the water and the roaring grows in her ears. The cold seeps up her body, her clothes become weights, one of her boots nearly comes off. The trees are moving so quickly – a smear of green as she tries to keep her head above the water level. She can see Dena’s head floating in the water just ahead of her. She reaches out- a rock collides with her middle.

“FUCK!” she yells. Her head slips under- two, three gulps of water and she comes up coughing. 

The current has spun her around, she uses her arms to propel forward- the way she’s pretty sure swimming works, and by divine chance she feels the cold fingers of Dena’s hand. She can’t call out – because the water is in her mouth and her ears and her nose. She pulls the girl against herself and looks along the riverside for a branch or a rock- anything they could grab onto.

Her vision is starting to blur.

Suddenly the roaring gets louder- there’s thick pockets of white bubbly water- crashing around mis-matched clumps of rocks. _Rapids_ she thinks.

She feels the hard stone surfaces collide with her side again- a tree branch scraps across her leg. There’s a low hanging tree just ahead of them- if she can just get closer to the bank.

Her body is getting weak- but she pushes off from everything she can touch, until the water is too deep again. They move faster- Dena’s little body is like an anchor. _Just hold on,_ Clarke thinks- gripping her waist and her hand, _just get to the tree._

She reaches out one arm- grabs the thickest branch she can and holds on. Her arm shakes- there’s blood running down the side of it. She can hear people yelling- just a few moments and they can get to her- she can hand Dena up to them. She grips her body to her side, but the weight becomes too much- as soon as she tries to switch hands, the current rips her away. The branch bends when she reaches out- trying to cling to her fingers.

NO!” she yells, “NO, no-“ 

When the branch breaks she goes completely under. Everything is black and cold and rushing. 

Then there are arms around her- pulling her. 

“Clarke?” a panicked voice says, “Hey Clarke, open your eyes- fuck, fuck, please be breathing. DANIELS GET OVER ON THIS SIDE!”

She can hear the voice- it’s not Bellamy’s, his would be angry, his was the CLARKE DON”T she had chosen to ignore before she drowned.

She drowned.

The tree broke and she had drowned.

“Clarke,” someone says again, “we’ve got you,” a bubble of water, “we’ll get you out of here.”

“Dena,” she was trying to save Dena- they could grab Dena, she was still close to the bank, someone could grab her. “Get Dena,” she says, “get Dena.”

“Oh thank God- hey, just hold on okay- FUCK! Fucking rocks, listen if you can hold onto me that would be helpful. Clarke?”

“Get Dena.”

“I can’t,” the voice says- it’s getting quieter. There’s a warmth surrounding her. “I’m so sorry Clarke I can’t.”

“Dena.”

“Is that blood? Shit- fuck – okay, we’re almost there. MONTY THROW ME SOMETHING! I CAN’T—FUCK- I'M FUCKING DROWNING----"

 

 

_She dreams that Bellamy has taken his boots back. He holds them away from her almost like an angry taunt._

_“This is what you wanted right?” he asks angrily, “I’m supposed to follow you and then you disappear and leave me to just deal with it.”_

_“Give me my shoes back,” she demands._

_“You can’t wear shoes Clarke- you’re dead. You’re fucking gone.”_

_She worries that his knife is gone too._

_At least he should have his knife._

 

 

“Clarke, hey it’s Monty. Please open your eyes. We’re gonna be back soon and ….you aren’t bleeding anymore. You need to open your eyes.”

“She’s got a concussion.”

“She’s in shock.”

“Maybe she bled out.”

“She’s breathing you fucking idiot.”

“Barely.”

“We need to get back, we need to move faster.”

“You want to carry this fucking stretcher!?”

“Bellamy Blake is going to murder every one of us if we don’t hurry the fuck up. Stop arguing. Green, keep an eye on her breathing- and her side, if it starts bleeding again…I don’t know maybe we’re in radio range.”

 

 

_She dreams that Dena is standing under the waterfall- her arms open and eyes wide. The water knocks her hair from the warrior braids. She’s thanking her- for the adventure. She’s taller now- maybe more grown up._

_She can’t grow up._

_The water turns to blood._

 

 

“Who the FUCK let her jump in?!”

“Bellamy-”

His voice is outside her head now- it couldn’t be that loud inside of her head. 

“She’s the Chancellor’s daughter. She’s on the council! Are you telling me that all five of the full grown men walking with her were so fucking distracted that they didn’t notice her jumping into a goddamn river?!”

“You yelling isn’t going to make this better.” 

_Her mother._

“She could have died. I knew I should have went with them. I fucking KNEW it.”

“You can’t follow her around for the rest of her life Bellamy. She’s Clarke. She’s always put other people before-”

“Do you think I don’t know that?! Do you think that I’m not painfully fucking aware of how little she seems to value her own life?!”

 “You’re making a scene Captain Blake.”

_Marcus Kane._

“I could seriously give a fuck.”

“She’ll make a full recovery. She’s pulled through much worse.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then what is? Bellamy - she’s Clarke! You know better than anyone that this kind of stuff is always gonna happen to her. You knew what you were signing up for-”

_Raven._

“Don’t go there right now. I’m not having this conversation again with you today.”

“The look on your face right now is not the look of a Captain concerned for the well-being of the Chancellor’s daughter.”

“No, you know what? You’re right. This is rage.”

 

 

 

She doesn’t dream at all. The pain in her side wakes her up. There are stitches there- she can feel where the skin has been pulled tight. Her muscles throb. She’s sure if she opens her eyes her eyeballs will fall right out of her head- but she has to. She has to know if they got her.

So she forces her eyelids open- blinks until everything comes into focus. The gray steel of medbay- a plastic curtain pulled around her for privacy. A dark head of hair is laying on the bed next to her knees- a ponytail.

“Raven?” she croaks.

Raven sits up- eyes wide and bloodshot. 

“Are you awake?” she demands, “You goddamn fucking idiot are you actually awake?”

“Did they get her?” Clarke asks, “Dena- is she alright?”

“What hurts?” Raven asks- jumping to her feet, “do you feel dizzy or anything- are you having trouble breathing?”

“Raven.”

“I have to get Abby- she needs to check your vitals. And- fuck- Bellamy I guess, if he’s back from his rage walk.”

“Raven.”

“Don’t got back to sleep,” she says, “I’ll be right back- please don’t go back to sleep!”

“Raven!”

It’s her mother that breaks the news- with Bellamy and Monty standing over her shoulders. Monty stares down at his feet- Bellamy meets her eyes the entire time.

“It was the fall,” her mother swears, “she hit her head when she fell in. It wouldn’t have mattered how quickly you got to her.”

But Clarke doesn’t believe that.

She almost wants to ask Bellamy if this is what it had felt like for him- with Charlotte, but it’s been so long since anyone has spoken her name she’s almost worried that he won’t know who she’s talking about.

He’s not saying much to her anyway.

For the four days she stays in medical- he comes by and asks someone how she is (doesn’t ask her) he’ll bring food or pour more water into her cup. He’ll look at her- like he’s expecting an apology- and then she’ll pretend to fall asleep.

She hasn’t really spoken. Her mother is telling people her throat is raw from coughing. It’s not.

 

Finally, when she’s discharged and her mother has brought her a new set of clothes to change into- Bellamy wanders back, his shoulder looking barren without his rifle. That glow that she had seen just a few days before has completely faded.

 

“So you’re just not talking to anyone?” he asks.

She looks up- he’s glaring at her like she’d turned her back on him. 

“Get up,” he says, “let’s go.”

“I have-“

“Clarke we aren’t doing this here.”

She doesn’t even have to ask what ‘this’ is. It’s what she’s been saving her voice up for. 

So they walk to her quarters. Side by side. 

 “What you did was reckless.”

“She was a child.”

“You can’t swim.”

“I managed.”

“You almost died do you understand that? Can you pull your head out of the clouds long enough to realize that most of this camp depends on you and you threw yourself into a raging river-”

“I was trying to save a life!”

“There were seven other people there Clarke!”

“I’m not going to apologize for trying to prevent a child from drowning!”

“And that doesn’t change the fact that you almost fucking died.”

“Well, I’m not the one that died am I!?”

He stops. He stops dead right in the center of the room, right where he’d kissed her the day his nephew was born. 

He looks around- desperately, and then shakes his head. "If this is how it’s going to be, I’ll walk.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you’re going to keep being reckless, if you’re gonna keep putting every person on this Earth before yourself, then I’m out. I won’t do this with you not if your gonna go off and gamble with both of our lives like it’s nothing. I don’t know if you have some guilt-ridden fucking death wish or what but…”

She doesn't even touch on what he's implying is going on between them. She's far too focused on making him understand, on making the one person who always seemed to get it see what was really going on here.

“I did what was right Bellamy and you fucking know it," she says, "What kind of a person would turn their back on a drowning child?”

“A person who can’t swim surrounded by five full grown men who can! Stop jumping at the chance to ease your own conscience and use your fucking head.”

“All I needed to do was make sure she got hold of something so they could grab her, and I had her- for a minute I- I actually had her.”

“And then what Clarke?" he demands, :Both of you were unconscious.” 

She doesn’t answer and her silence only pisses him off more. “What do you think that was like?" he asks, "Hearing on the radio that you’d drowned. Seeing you come back to camp covered in blood and barely breathing?! It was supposed to be an easy trip to the village and somehow you end up on your fucking deathbed!”

They both sound hysterical- hers comes from grief...his is just- misguided. 

“Why are we talking about me?!" she asks, "A child is dead.”

“Someone else could have gotten her- my guys could have,”

“Why didn’t they?”

“Because they were focused on you-“

“Why would they be-“

“BECAUSE I TOLD THEM TO BE.”  
   
“You-“ she steps away from him, “you told them-“  
   
“Don’t look at me like that.”  
   
“They should have went after her.”  
   
“And they would have- if you hadn’t jumped in.”  
   
“Me?” she says hysterically, “me? Who the fuck cares about me-“  
   
“Your people.”

There's no shame, just acceptance- it's cold and dark and though it's familiar it's certainly not welcome.  
   
“What about her people?” she asks.  
   
He almost shrugs, practically does, and she wants to throw up. 

“Get out.”

Something breaks between them- or at least that’s how it feels. 

 

**...**

 

"You did what I asked you to do," he tells them- because he can see in their eyes that they haven't had a good night's sleep since they came dragging Clarke's body back to camp, and if he’s an expert in anything it’s sleepless nights. "Councilwoman Griffin is alive because of you."

He sweeps his eyes back and forth- watching each man listen without really understanding- without really wanting to understand. Oliver Shi makes eye contact with him, holds it in that way Miller does when he has something unpleasant to report. 

"Shi?" he prompts.

He shakes his head once- stares out at the tops of the trees just visible over the wall. Bellamy lets them all sit there in the silence. They have to talk about this. They have to get it over with or they’ll never be able to move on. 

"She asked me to get her," Shi finally says, "the girl- Cl- Councilwoman Griffin asked me to-"

Bellamy holds his hand up, tries to ignore the echo of Clarke's voice.

_“All I needed to do was make sure she got hold of something so they could grab her, and I had her- for a minute I- I actually had her.”_

"I know what she asked you to do," he says. He’d have known even if she hadn’t told him, because where most people’s drowning thoughts would be _survive, survive, survive_ Clarke’s were _save, save, save_. 

"Well,” Shi drags on, his hands extended out in front of him like maybe he was back in that river all over again. “I could have. It would have been hard but- I could have gotten to her.”

_“Why are we talking about me? A child is dead.”_

“You probably could have,” he agrees.

Shi narrows his eyes- looks around at his brothers in arms and his Commanding Officer, waiting for someone to make sense of this, "And that's just okay?" he demands.

_“BECAUSE I TOLD THEM TO BE!”_

"Of course it's not.” His mouth feels dry, but he forces the words out. “It's never okay- nothing about most of the decisions you have to make down here will ever be okay- but you make them. You did as you were ordered. You chose Clarke because her life was-" he can't force himself to say the words "a higher priority" - it's selfish coming from him. "Because she is one of your people and that's what we do," he corrects.

They all look away from him- even Shi, even Monty. 

"She won't be the last," Bellamy says, he almost wishes someone had said it to him- after Charlotte, "you've all seen this before- you'll see it again." 

Still they don't say anything. With every sentence he can feel them being pulled further and further away from him- away from the stone cold logic of a soldier. That little girl had been more than just a name to them, they’d seen her, maybe spoken to her, actively ignored Clarke Griffin when she’d ordered them to go after her. It’s a strange grey-area of guilt, sacrifice in the line of duty. No one wants to prioritize lives- that seems more like a job for God. He’s fighting a losing battle. 

"Take the rest of the day off,” he tells them, “dismissed."

They start to walk off- heads still a little low. Monty walks much faster than the others- and Bellamy assumes he’s probably taking Clarke’s side in all of this. Shi only makes it a few steps before he turns around. 

"Captain Blake," he says, with a rare tone of formality, "if this is going to keep happening, someone should probably teach Clarke Griffin how to swim."

Someone should. It won’t be him. They haven’t spoken in two weeks. 

Not a word.

Her silence is unbearable, but he bears it because she needs him to.

This was Clarke’s destiny all along - to live here, to die here. She understands this planet in a way he never could, and it understands her. It knows how to hunt her. 

He stole his own destiny- linked it to his sister’s through sheer force and somewhere along the line it just happened to intertwine with Clarke’s. Hhe doesn’t belong here the way she does. Where she sees adventure, he sees imminent death. She thinks everything is beautiful. She never says so, but he can see it in the way she looks at things. She notices colors and shapes- it’s something he’s learned from her- how to observe outside of strategy. The trouble is when she finds that beauty in danger, the way she so often does, fire and mountain climbing and floods and Lexa- things that they call “problems” in council meetings. Normal people run in the face of these problems- Clarke just stands there, arms open, and lets them rain right down on her- like she wants to live through it, or die from it.

She’d be okay with dying here. She’d be okay with dying knowing that it meant someone else got to survive. Because her selflessness borders on pathological and she’s not capable of understanding what losing her would do to the people here. Life goes on. The river takes a life and it flows on. Something about what had happened that day led Clarke to believe that she was meant to be the one lost to the water- and Bellamy had just stolen her destiny away the way he’d stolen his own. 

She’s alive though- so he doesn’t give a fuck how fucking mad she is. She’s fucking crazy and he’s fucking crazy for feeling the way he does about her. 

Guinevere and Lancelot. 

In in this twisted metaphor he can’t seem to shake (where the fuck do all these metaphors come from?) the Earth is King Arthur - ready to rip the hearts from both of their chests the moment he realizes they’ve developed a loyalty to each other stronger than what they have for him. 

King Arthur was the winner in the end- in almost all of the stories, and he'd read Octavia basically every story he could get his hands on. 

So Clarke is pissed at him, because she knows he’s holding the finger right up in King Arthur’s face, and someone else got hurt because of it. 

A kid died because of it.

He feels that. Whether she realizes it or not, he feels the weight of that little girl’s soul with every breath he takes. Had he been there- he would have done everything he could to save her, he knows that. But he can’t pretend that he isn’t happy with his men’s decision. 

Clarke is alive.

Just a few days before, the father of the little girl came to speak to her. Lincoln and Octavia came with him. They, shuffling the baby back and forth between them, explained that he was coming to “ease Clarke’s soul.” One of the grounders who had been there that day- the man’s brother- had explained the river. That it was hungry, and none of them could get to her quick enough, that Clarke had risked her life trying, and her people had gone after her the way they were trained. “It’s forgiveness,” Lincoln had said, “a way for both of them to accept her death and move forward. Rain is a good man. He’s lost family before."

Bellamy wanted to tell them that nothing that man could possibly say would make a difference - but he didn’t have to. Anyone could see it on her face that evening, as she said goodbye to him at the gate. There were shadows under her eyes, a distance between herself and everyone around her that he could see plain as day- like lines on a map. 

She met Bellamy’s gaze on accident as she walked away, and for just a moment he felt it- she wanted to speak to him so badly.

 _“Just keep walking,”_ he thought, _“Come here. I can fix it. I swear I will, just keep walking.”_

But her feet stopped and she turned and went towards Raven’s instead.  
        
So they haven’t talked in a month- and at this point he’s pretty sure he’s just as mad at her as she is at him, but he still follows her with his eyes. He dreams about her- about losing her, about having her. He’s not sure which is worse. 

They’re both exhausting.

At Council meetings they stand like two silent mountains- incapable of speaking. It feels like a headache that won’t go away- an annoying and persistent pinch right behind his eyeballs. 

 _“I won’t ever be sorry that it wasn’t you,”_ he thinks- so loudly she must hear it. 

She won’t fight with him. She won’t so much as glare at him. It seems like an indicator that whatever is broken in their friendship can’t possibly be repaired, but then again- she still has his knife. He’d left hers out on his table every night- she could have slipped in and grabbed it so quickly he may not have even noticed, but she hasn’t. 

That’s another middle finger right in King Arthur’s face- she just doesn’t realize it yet. 

He stands there in silence, surrounded by a fog of unseasonable humidity, and wonders for the first time in a long time if he could ever look around at this place and not be miserable. 

But there’s another person now- a tiny little person- a future. He’s an Uncle. His Sister, his poor lonely little sister, has real family. There’s a freedom here that never existed on the Ark, and he has no choice but to focus on that. 

So he turns on his heels and wanders away from the wall- back towards his own quarters, where his Sister has been staying for the last few weeks. 

She hasn’t asked what was said between he and Clarke- but he knows she’s waiting around to comfort him, should he need it. He’s probably ready to talk about, willing to even, but when he opens the door he’s hit with a whirlwind of sobbing. 

"He won’t stop crying,” Octavia says, with tears streaming down her own cheeks, “I don’t know what else to do.”

Bellamy’s world shrinks down until it’s just the three of them, and he spends the next hour pacing back and forth, his nephew on his shoulder, his sister’s tired eyes following him, until finally the baby calms and down and drifts off to sleep. 

“Something must be wrong,” Octavia says, once he’d laid him down on his bedroll and shaken out his stiff arms, “he’s never cried like that before.”

“You said he hasn’t been sleeping through the night right?”

“He wakes up to eat and then he just- won’t go back to sleep.”

“He was over tired O,” he says- trying to be reassuring, but knowing there’s no real way to quell that kind of worry. “You used to get like that. His pissed off crying sounds a lot like yours did actually.”

“He seems fine now,” she says with a bit of relief, “I’ll let him sleep and if- if something is still wrong when he wakes up I’m going to take him to medical.”

“I’ll go with you,” Bellamy tells her, “if you need me to.”

“Yeah, I’d like that actually. I don’t think Lincoln will be back for a few more days.”

Bellamy sits down next to her, down on the ground the furthest they can be from the sleeping baby. Octavia needs to get some sleep too- and he’s about to tell her so when she turns and looks at him.

“You doing alright?” she asks- he hears so much of himself in her words that his head jerks up.

“Yeah- I’m,” he stops and shakes his head, “I’ll be okay.”  
   
“Clarke blames you for the girl?” It’s blunt, and true, and the first time anyone had ever actually said it out loud.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Was it your fault?” She knows the situation, she’s heard the story, but they haven’t discussed it yet. Despite their many similarities, she can't hear what goes on in his head. For all she knows, he has taken the blame for it. He hasn’t- not really. Part of that is being a good soldier and another part is being selfish. Knowing a child lost their life hurts, but the alternative- 

“No,” he says, “it was hers.”

She shouldn’t have jumped in after her. She should have thought it through. If Clarke's life hadn’t been a factor they may have gotten to her.

Octavia raises her eyebrows and he looks away.

If she hadn’t jumped in, the girl probably would have died anyway- Abby said she believed cause of death was the girl’s head injury from the impact against the rock before she’d fallen in. If Clarke hadn’t jumped- she’d be inconsolable, she’d be completely sure that she could have made a difference.

There was no good alternative. It was just one of those things- one of those horrible gut shots you just have to struggle through. 

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he finally says, “the Earth took her- it does that.”

Octavia nods and looks down at her feet. “Yeah but Clarke- I mean, how much guilt can a person actually handle?”

“I’m still here.”

“You’re different,” she says, “you’ve got us.”

“Clarke’s got plenty.”

She’s got Raven at least- Monty and Jasper- her mother if she wanted her- and him. She certainly has him. 

“Does she know that?” Octavia asks.

Bellamy doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know. 

“Look,” she says, “I know everyone makes it seem like it has to be this or it has to be that. You have to be together or having sex or married or whatever. Bellamy honestly it’s no one’s fucking business what goes on between you and Clarke. You two can do whatever you want- be whatever you want, even if no one but the two of you understand it.”

He opens his mouth to be defensive, to deny something, or tell her she’s got it all wrong, but there’s nothing to deny. For the first time she’s letting that relationship stay as ambiguous as it is to the two people trapped in it and he doesn’t even know how to respond to that kind of accuracy. 

“The thing is though,” she continues “this isn’t working. Whatever you are, you have to be able to be it together."

She reaches over and grabs his hand. She doesn’t expect him to tell her that she’s right. He has no intentions of doing so.

But she is- and they both know it. 

 The next time he sees his sister she’s on horseback, riding past the gate at a full gallop.


	5. Chapter 5

She thinks she hears him whispering about how much he hates her, but the thunder makes it hard to hear much of anything other than her own footsteps.

Each one is a goddamn battle because her boots- his boots, the old ones she tries to fit into when she needs to feel powerful, are sticking in the mud like a glue trap. It makes the flattest ground feel like an incline- like the earth is actually trying to suck her in, finally be rid of her at last.

_I almost got you before. I won’t miss this time._

She’s never felt safe in these woods, but she’s never felt this unwelcome in them either. 

They’d learned about weather in Earth Studies, natural disasters and worst case scenarios, but diagrams and statistics are nothing compared to actually standing in it. It’s indescribable, what it feels like when nature finally turns on you. Like the planet is trying to clean the dirt from its skin with rain, lightning, and wind. 

It wouldn’t be difficult to wash her people away. In fact, if they’d been any closer to the coastline they’d have a whole other set of concerns, but for now the plan was to get everyone into secure shelter. The thick metal of the exodus ship had provided some, the roughly dug root cellar some more, and their meek attempt at an emergency bunker was able to house the children and injured. They’d only had about a day’s notice. Their poor excuse for a radar isn’t exactly sound technology and as soon as clouds roll in it can barely keep a signal. Word came from the grounders actually, they’d seen storms like this before. Octavia had come riding into camp on horseback practically emitting a warning siren. From there, everything had been systematic. Survival mode was their factory setting. Clarke rounded everyone up, Bellamy took charge of rations, and “the council” focused on storing exposed equipment and reinforcing the fences around camp. Abby delivered one of her quick speeches about surviving as a unit and the camp hovered in its usual limbo between organization and chaos.

Clarke had been impressed. Everyone had done their part quickly and without complaint. They had never really prepared for something like this, other than a few casual conversations. Thunderstorms came and went all the time in the summer, they’d even survived a few blizzards, but in their four years on Earth they’d never been threatened with something of this magnitude. The Earth had finally turned on them, finally brought one of its sea monsters onto their land. A hurricane was coming.

“Monty isn’t an idiot.” Bellamy says, “They found shelter.”

She forgets for a second that he’s actually behind her. She’s pretty sure she’s just hearing him rant and rave in her head again.These are the first words they’ve exchanged in weeks. She knows that he’s right, she’s known that since she first started down the familiar trail into the forest, but something had lodged a hook into her gut and was pulling her further and further from safety. Guilt maybe, or some kind of horribly morbid curiosity. She’d felt a responsibility to find her friends, but she also should have turned back a long time ago.

_I should have been with them,_ she thinks, _if it hadn’t been for that fucking river I would have been with them._

“I sent them out here,” she tells Bellamy for the third time since he’d come stomping down the trail with panicked eyes and his usual grumbling insults. 

Monty and four others had traveled to a meadow along the eastern edge of the forest where they usually gathered dandelions and burdock leaves. Monty had been going on these trips for about a year, even without Clarke, moving a little further and further with each one- trying to find anything they could use to supplement their dwindling supply in medical. This time they’d gotten word of the storm just hours after he’d left. Clarke had been hoping that they’d take note of the changing weather and head back, but as the winds started to kick up and Abby ordered everyone to take shelter Monty and his team were still unaccounted for.

She could hear the ghosts- all around her. 

_“I’ll find another adventure.”_

_“Where? On the other side of the river? In the mountains?”_

_“Everywhere.”_

__

 

So, she’d marched pointedly into the forest telling herself that she still had a few hours before things got really bad, she may run into them coming back, and if worse came to worst she’d crawl down into one of the bunkers sprinkled all over this place.

It was a stupid plan, but it was better than hiding and hoping. She’s never been any good at that.

As the storm rolls in, the trees aren’t providing any kind of shelter from the rain that seems to be coming in sideways from every direction. It had come a lot quicker than she’d expected, a dull roar that had started on the horizon and flooded the woods with shadows and wind and an eerie sort of emptiness. Every bird had stopped chirping, every insect had disappeared. The air was thick with something, charged with this horrible looming promise of destruction that seemed to make even the trees look weary. 

Hurricanes didn’t come this far inland- this was different, but as the sky lit up with the first flash of lightening, Clarke hadn’t stopped moving. Not until the first time she cupped her hands around her mouth to yell out Monty’s name and the wind knocked her words right out of the air. The trees started bending, a wooded wave coming right at her, whipping her hair around her face and sending dirt and leaves into her eyes.

She knew then that she had underestimated the storm- or overestimated herself - but as soon as the panic started to sink in Bellamy came storming through the trees behind her, almost as intimidating as the hurricane itself, and the second she locked eyes with him all of her anxieties disappeared. 

The storm was strangling the life out of the forest around her, but Bellamy and his rifle were at her side, and that made her feel sort of invincible. He’d always brought out a confidence in herself that she couldn’t find on her own. Maybe he was her tragic flaw.

She was certainly his.

“Clarke,” he yells, after a bone-shaking clap of thunder, “do you understand that we’re going to-” Somewhere a tree branch cracks and the sound must make him stumble because she hears him curse as he hits the ground. And of course he’s on his feet by the time she turns around, but there’s a tear in his pants and she’s pretty sure she can see blood. That quick, with just a pinprick of blood, his being there deflates her misguided confidence.

_There was blood on the rock- just a bit. That’s how she died. She hit her head when she fell. It wouldn’t have mattered how quickly you got to her._

“What the fuck are you doing out here?” she yells at him, frustrated and exasperated and wanting to punch him right in his overprotective face.

“Chasing you!” He steps right in front of her, towering a little, the way he does when he’s angry. More often than not whenever she starts feeling like she wants to punch him, he’s feeling he same way about her. They’re a united front- in everything.

“I don’t need you to chase me! I’m a grown woman!“

“Then start acting like one!”

The wind gets worse, one powerful gust that actually blows her into him. He holds onto her instinctively. It’s one of those strange moments where a metaphorical relationship actually becomes a reality. He’s the only thing keeping her feet on the ground but she can’t decide whether to grip him harder or push him away.

“We have to find a bunker,” she says. The rain is bouncing off of his jacket right into her eyes. She can barely see over his shoulder, the landmarks that would guide her to those hidden shelters covered by a thick layer of grey. It’s strange, she’d never seen wind so strong that it stopped being invisible.

“Too far,” another gust of wind knocks them together, “fuck, we should try to make it to the dropship.”

She doesn’t want to go anywhere near the dropship. As far as she’s concerned it’s the most haunted place on this planet and the last thing she wants to do is deal with the ghosts of her past, _Dead kids. Dead because of you._ but it was only a ten minute walk from where they were standing and a half rusted pile of metal and bad memories was better than nothing. So she turns away from him and leads the way, back to the beginning while the world ends around them.

When they arrive, she tries not to actually look around, not at the graveyard, not at the tattered wall. They barge their way into what’s left of their first home and use seatbelt scraps to reinforce the half-broken door. It still shakes violently with every other gust of wind. 

It’s freezing cold, dark, and somewhere she can hear water dripping. They don’t wander around. Bellamy takes the safety off of his rifle and sits down to lean against the wall. Clarke stays on her feet, her knees are shaking, but that might be from the cold.

"We need a better warning system," she says. She can only see an outline of him, but she hears the wet fabric of his jacket hit the floor and she follows suit. "I wouldn't have let him go if I'd known how bad it was going to be."

"You actually thought you could catch up with him?" he asks. His tone makes her flashback to the days when he called her Princess and instigated riots behind her back.

"I had to try,” she says. 

It’s starting to sound an awful lot like their last argument. 

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he demands.

Yeah. This is exactly like their last argument, but the thing is, this time, they’re in this together. She may have jumped the gun but he came jumping in after her.

That’s how it’s always going to be. 

"What the fuck is wrong with  _you_?” she demands, “They needed you in camp."

"Everyone in camp was safe and accounted for, except for you."

"I had a plan." 

Sort of.

Nothing about this is funny, but he laughs anyway- just to make his derision of her perfectly clear. "Yeah Shi told me about your plan,  _Clarke's just going to find a bunker or something."_

"I've survived worse."

"Barely.” 

 

He turns away from her. She wants to ask him about his knee, because he sort of sounds like he’s in pain and she's pretty sure it's his bad leg, but the thunder and the cold are giving her a headache and the last thing she wants to do is escalate this argument any further by "coddling" him.

"I would have found a bunker,” she promises, “I've memorized the map. It would have been fine."

"So a tree falls right on it- you can’t get out and no one knows where you are." 

She doesn’t say anything. Telling him that was a risk worth taking will only make things worse. 

"I had to try." Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, she can see his smug glare as he shakes his head at her. "Stop making that face."

They sit there in silence for a few minutes. The pitter-patter of the rain grows into a fierce pounding. It’s only hail, but the way it echoes around the dropship makes it sound like someone is opening fire on them. Suddenly it starts to feel like their being hunted, like they’re hiding from some fierce predator and it’s only a matter of time until it catches up with them. The trees are a little too far away to be of any real concern, but if somehow the roof came off this place they’d be fucked. And then there’s the lightning. Clarke doesn’t know a lot about conduction but she’s pretty sure they’d be fried up pretty thoroughly if lightning happened to strike anywhere near this hunk of scrap metal.

“Sounds like it’s getting worse,” she says. Partly to break the silence and partly because she hopes hearing his voice will give her that comforting burst of confidence it sometimes does. Instead, when he finally speaks, he’s still that smug manchild-turned King that she thought he’d left behind here.

"When I die,” he says, “whatever it is that finally kills me- it's going to have something to do with you."

He's said a lot of fucked up things to her, especially when he's pissed off, but despite her familiarity with his fury, this one hurts. Mostly it's because it's true, and she knows it's true, the people in camp know it's true, the council knows it's true, the grounders know it's true, his sister certainly knows it's true. Hearing him acknowledge it like he's been diagnosed with a terminal illness makes her sick with guilt and grief and a really desperate sort of frustration.

"I have never asked you risk your life for me,” she says as calmly as she can manage, “for them? Yes. For me? Never."

Instead of disagreeing with her, he just lets out a snort.

"What?"

"It's not a choice Clarke,” he says.

"And that's my fault?" her voices raises, bouncing off of the walls and drowning out the sound of the storm for a few seconds- at least until another clap of thunder shakes everything around them.

"No," he concedes, "but you could keep it in mind next time you do something fucking stupid.”

"I don't need a hero. If I want to jump into a river I’m going to do it. I don’t need anyone jumping in after me. I’m a _grown woman_ not a little girl.”

His lack of response annoys her more than anything he possibly could have said would. He knows that. He knows her. He knows how to fight with her, how to set her off. He has the advantage of being the only person that consistently sees her with her guard down. Since they’re adults, most of their arguments are settled pretty quickly. This one has been a haunting lying dormant between them for years, flaring up on anniversaries or with a new batch of moonshine, a wound rubbed raw by the river and the girl and the last few weeks of silence. It’s one they usually walk away from, because actually having it out could potentially ruin the partnership they’ve built. That is the last thing Clarke wants. Bellamy has his faults, but he fills this unnamable role in her life that basically amounts to her other half. He’s one of those “all of the above” kind of people, family, friend, comrade, empirical soulmate.

He’s more important than he realizes, not only to her but to their entire world here. His lack of self-awareness is exceptionally annoying and God has she missed him.

"I don't know what you're so afraid of,” she says as she leans against a cold wall- as far from him as she could possibly be. “You've done fine without me before."

"That's what you think this is?” he asks, a hitch in his voice tells her she’s succeeded in offending him. “I'm scared you won't be around to hold my hand?"

"I don't need to be rescued."

"I disagree Princess."

"Fuck you Bellamy."

Now the tension she’d felt right before the storm hit doesn’t seem like much of anything. There’s an electricity buzzing through her muscles, making her fingers twitch- a rare kind of rage that only he can bring out in her. It’s an exposed rage, one that makes her feel vulnerable and out of control so she tries her best to shake it off without going anywhere near him.

She stands, and she thinks about how far she would have to walk to get his fucking voice out of her head.

"Stop pacing,” he finally says after about ten minutes.

Her rage is still pretty potent. "Or what?"

"Or I'm going to shoot you in the fucking foot,” and just to be an asshole he cocks the gun.

She just shakes her head and continues to pace. "I can’t believe we let you carry a gun."

"You'd be dead ten times over if I didn't carry a gun."

The hail has stopped, but the thunder sounds closer. The sheet metal actually rattles after each burst of it. She’s trying to maintain the silence, but even his breathing sounds accusatory. 

_I’m here because of you._

"We can't be stuck here all night. We'll kill each other,” she says, after she sneezes and he doesn’t even have the common courtesy to say “bless you.”

"How exactly are you going to kill me?"

"Why would I tell you that?"

"You have your gun?" He already knows the answer to that. It’s another argument that they’ve beaten to death.

"I don't carry it-"

"You should be carrying it every time you leave camp."

She pulls off her boots- opting to sit down and massage the creeping cold out of her feet to seem disinterested in the lecture she’s heard him give a thousand times. "It was an emergency."

"Right, it would have been stupid to waste time grabbing a weapon before running into a dangerous, dark forest."

She rolls her eyes. "Can’t shoot a hurricane."

"Can't leisurely stroll around in one either,” she hears a sound that may have been him kicking his boots off too.

"I was looking for Monty."

"Monty was nowhere near camp Clarke and you knew that." The sort of smug, sarcastic bite to his tone is gone- replaced now by genuine anger.

"How could I have possibly known that?!"

"You're getting more and more careless and I'm starting to think it's on purpose."

Her hands stop moving. She tries to make out his facial expression in the dark. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

He stares back at her- completely unapologetic. “If anyone else had decided to take a walk in a hurricane you'd call them suicidal."

Just like that, everything changes. Before this moment, while enraging- the argument had been relatively light hearted, standard banter that they usually just bounce back forth. This is deep dark shit that she knows he’s been thinking for a long time. He’s never actually said it to her face- not directly, mostly because he knows she doesn’t want to hear it.

"I know you and I have had our fair share of arguments, but you're coming dangerously close to crossing a line with me."

"You’ve never given a shit about crossing lines with me,” he says, “walls, borders, lines none of that matters. Not when you’re Clarke fucking Griffin.”

Part of her wishes she had brought the gun, it would feel great just to point it at him right now. Not pull the trigger, never pull the trigger, but just do something to express the fury making her fingers shake. And the irony, 

_You taught me how to do this. Remember that? When you were reckless and careless and selfish._

She settles for a deep breath and an insult- one he usually throws around during their late night policy arguments.

"You are unbearable."

" _I_ am?" He repeats

"Yeah. _You are_

He shuffles around without responding. She sees him lay back and put his arm behind his head. 

"You're never going to fall asleep,” she says. 

"Better than having to talk to you." 

She needs to keep talking to him though, because sitting in silence is only going to remind her what is out there, what she'd been foolish enough to walk into, and what he'd risked to come after her. 

"You know, you've spent the better part of an hour snapping at me,” she says, “I think it's time you get over it." 

He doesn’t even pick his head up. "The thing is- I don't really give a shit what you think. You're so fucking stubborn you’re not even trying to understand why I'm pissed off." 

"No, I get it," she sneers. "You think I'm an idiot, I'm just going to get myself and everyone else killed. Nice to see nothing has changed.'" 

"Clarke don't play dumb- everything has changed." 

He’s kissed her now. He’s kissed her and shared this…amazing thing with her and that’s an intimacy she never thought she could have with another person. He has a family- he has a little boy out there who will call him Uncle and he’s still chasing after her, risking his life. 

_Love. That’s what that’s called- in case you were wondering._

Glancing around them, she realizes the poetic irony of their current situation. The worst parts of her story that seem to just keep replaying over and over. Caring about Clarke Griffin means having your heart ripped out, fighting for her means losing yourself, loving her means dying. Bellamy’s been dodging that curse for years. 

"It's bad,” she says, after a perfectly timed boom of thunder, “it’s always going to be bad. Everyone knows it and there's nothing you can do but stay out of its way. " 

He’s always been good at hearing her, at hearing exactly what she’s saying even if she’s talking around it or not saying anything at all. He’d tell you it was part of his big brother instincts, but really it’s because he understands her just as well as she understands him. 

"It'll pass,” he says. 

"Not before it destroys everything." 

"Not permanent,” he mumbles like maybe he actually is falling asleep, “we've rebuilt before." 

"And then another storm will come along and destroy it. Seems like a pretty vicious cycle." 

"That's the way things work Clarke." He's not as angry as he was before. She’s almost comforted by that. 

"You know people used to chase storms?" she says, recalling photographs of motor vehicles with large satellites and antennas on their roofs. "To film them, learn about them maybe. People are just fascinated by destruction I think." 

He hesitates for a second. "It's not about the destruction. It’s about surviving.” 

"You aren’t afraid of storms?” 

"I'm afraid of this one,” he says somberly. 

He’s sitting up now, looking at her. It makes her feel trapped so she lets the metaphor slip. “Obviously not, if your only concern was hunting me down to scream at me.” 

For a moment he's silent, and then he lets out a humorless laugh. “You know what?” he says as he pulls on his boots and shoots to his feet, “fuck this.” He shoulders his rifle. 

“Where are you going?” 

“Away from you.” 

“Sure you can let me out of your sight that long?” 

He stops halfway through walking towards the hatch. She watches his shoulders sink. 

"Clarke, I have never willingly let anything happen to you,” he says when he finally turns and looks at her, “and I'm not going to start now. If you chose to let that make you feel belittled that's on you." 

"I don't understand you, why- why do you have this fucking obsession with being my protector?” she yells it- and it sounds a lot like the way a person takes their first big breath after almost drowning. That’s basically what’s she doing. 

He doesn’t really react, he stands there and stares. She waits until the next burst of thunder ends to look him right in the eye. "It's going to get you killed." 

It's not a joke. It's a serious problem in their relationship and it would be selfish of her not to point that out to him, to keep living life like it’s okay that his reflexes make him a human shield. But it’s also so much more than that, the fact that he sees so much worth in her makes her feel uncomfortable. She hates the idea of letting him down, or living her whole life trying to make it worth his. 

He’s an Uncle now. He has a family. 

"Bellamy don't put that on me." she says. 

He rolls his eyes, "Put what?" 

"Your life! It's bad enough that I feel personally responsible for every one of our people-“ he starts to open his mouth to argue with her so she stands up, almost putting them at equal eye level. "You're not an idiot. You've been by my side since we got here, you know how this works, you know the cycle. Stop chasing the fucking storm!" 

"Ungrateful as fuck," he mumbles as he tries to turn away from her. She reaches out and grabs his arm. 

"No. I care about you,” she says. “Bellamy, I care about what happens to you. I've lived with a lot but I wouldn't be able to live with your blood on my hands. I've come too close to that before. You have to stop." 

It sounds like she’s about to cry. She watches him struggle with that for a minute before pulling away from her. 

"First of all," he says- after obviously suppressing whatever profanity was probably his reflexive response, "my feelings barely answer to me. They sure as fuck don’t answer to you. You don’t get a say in what I will or won't die for." 

She’s so frustrated with him in that moment that she takes a step towards him, like getting in his face would actually make this any better. "I might actually hate you,” she lies. 

He looks down at her, neither of them seem very cold anymore. "That's not what this is,” he says. 

Something bangs against the side of the dropship and they jump apart. Bellamy instinctively points his gun towards the door. It was probably just a stray tree branch caught up in the wind. It’s easy to get swept away by something so strong – and when that happens someone usually gets hurt. 

"We need to be honest with each other," she says- more to herself than to him really. 

"When do I lie to you?” he asks, “When have I ever lied to you? Honesty is something you struggle with, not me." 

She wants to clear up that suicidal walk in a hurricane nonsense before they get into anything else. It’s time to switch back into survival mode. They need to work together, always, their personal emotions cannot get in the way of that. "I went looking for them because I asked them to go- it's as simple as that. I’ve survived down here so far, I can handle myself,” she reminds him. 

Surprisingly he doesn’t argue. "Fine." 

"Now,” she begins- trying to keep the accusation out of her voice so this remains the semi- civil conversation it calmed to, “we're both stuck out here until it blows over. Camp is-" 

"Camp is fine," she can practically hear his fingers clenching. 

"That's not the point,” she says. “Since when do you put my safety above theirs?"  
   
We’ve been here before, we’ve done this before. So many times. 

He shakes his head, "That's not what I did." 

"It's exactly what you did." 

"Camp is full of people who are more than capable of handling things. They aren't sniveling toddlers and we had a plan. You were alone-" 

"There has to be a contingency-" she tries to talk over him but he just raises his voice. 

"You run out into a hurricane and I'm just supposed to watch you go?!" 

She feels like she may cry again, that tight pinching feeling right under her eyes. "Look, we've made sacrifices,” she says, opening her arms to the emptiness around them, “because of who we chose to be down here. We're leaders and I promise you that the day is coming when one of us is going to have to lose the other." 

He looks a little caught off guard, "That’s-" 

"And if both of us go together than those same people who ruled on the Ark are going to try to take power down here-" 

"Clarke-" 

"It'll be a disaster, everyone will die." 

"Clarke-" 

"Our emotions, however we may feel about each other, cannot risk-" 

"You don’t know the first thing about my emotions!" He’s getting loud again. 

"You and I cannot have the same relationship that you and Octavia do,” she blurts out. 

He laughs, but it’s still not his real laugh. It’s angry. "No, I actually trust my sister not to get herself killed." 

"You think I’m weak?" she tries not to sound hurt. He notices, because he takes a minute to look at her and take deep breath before setting his gun on the ground. 

He walks towards her until their feet are touching. "I think you're brave and selfless and in way over your fucking head, and I’m not going to lose you to pointless heroics." 

"Bellamy-" 

"You want me to be honest?” he asks, “The day you stop breathing, everything down here is going to change and I don't want to know what that feels like." 

He takes a few steps back and there’s something in the way that he looks at her that makes her feel safe and guilty at the same time. She doesn’t deserve this, not from him. He doesn’t get anything from this relationship, he stands by her and half the time she’s the one pushing him into the line of fire. And she needs him to be safe, people need him to be safe, but she needs him to be with her also, because what the hell would she do without Bellamy? 

So she’ll push him away and lose him or she’ll drag him along and lose him because no matter what she does, this world isn’t going to let her keep something like him, something reliable and strong and unwavering. 

But he’s being honest with her and he hasn’t told her how he feels about her since those first days on the ground. Obviously things had changed, obviously he cared about her, but somewhere along the line it had grown into something more complex. Their bond was strong, but it was still breakable- all things are breakable. 

"Hey,” she says as she steps towards him. Her face is still kind of hot from being angry, but it’s different now. This is about telling truths, even the ones you never really planned to say out loud. “You're one of the best friends I've ever had. You're my family, Bellamy,“ She reaches for him, and though he interrupts her he doesn’t shake her off. 

"We don't have to do this now,” he says, “neither of us is dying." 

He’s come so far, he’s a better person now- despite everything that’s happened. He watches her struggle and he understands, and when he gets pissed it’s because he’s worried about her. He’s risked his life since he was six fucking years old to take care of the people he loves. He’s a goddamn hero, and she’s just another problem. "I don’t want to be the reason you die." 

"People have died for less." He says- half joking, because they’re standing really close and this is feels like a different kind of storm. She grips his arm and he meets her eyes- as serious as he’s ever been. 

“I’ll always go after you,” he says, “I can’t just- I can’t. I won’t. I’m always coming after you.” 

_And from there things just sort of- happen, quick as that hurricane blew in._


	6. Chapter 6

He falls back against the cold floor- exhausted and weak, the way they fell to earth, and in that collision there was just as much confusion as there is now. He may be a different person because of her.

Despite the ominous feel of it, and the wind still howling outside, it’s not the worst situation he’s ever been in- especially with her- but it’s certainly up there. 

His time on earth has basically just been a series of increasingly fucked up moments with the occasional respite that only seemed to make the next bad thing feel even worse.

He doesn’t get a lot of peace down here. Most nights sleep is so far ahead of him that giving up seems more practical than continuing to limp after it. So he lays back, stares at nothing with wide open eyes and lets all those moments flow back through his mind. The ones that he wishes he could give back, the ones that he holds onto a little too tight, and the ones he still can’t believe actually happened.

 

It’s a self-destructive process and he knows it, but it has prepared him for this.

Truthfully, surprise isn’t among all of the emotions buzzing around his head as he tries to catch his breath. For about sixty brief seconds he’s self-aware enough to actually be proud of the way he’s handling this. And then those sixty seconds are over, the moment extends into moments and while his muscles hum to rest and the sweat cools on his skin he realizes that this territory he’s stumbled into is more uncharted than any of the ridgelines and forests they’ve been trying to map. 

This is deeper and darker, the internalized psychological sort of dark where your conscience decides to kill the lights because you just can’t handle it. 

He’s handled a lot. If he was asked to give a self-assessment of his own mental welfare he’d admit that there was room for improvement, but overall he’d been able to stomach just about every horrible thing the earth had spat his way. But it seemed that despite his prowess as an amateur warrior and semi-adequate leader he’d finally found the line.

The lights had stayed on for war, attempted murder, falling to earth, plague, battle, loss, guilt, and decisions that made him feel physically less human. They went out for Clarke Griffin.

She was at his side now- as she always was. He could probably reach out a hand and grasp hers if it wasn’t for the insurmountable wall between them. Metaphysical and built from big stone blocks of tension and frustration, that wall was always there. Until today he’d have guessed that it was built up to somewhere around their knees, since they’d spent the last three years systematically demolishing it one stone at a time. Now, its taller than it’s ever been. It’s clear to him that they’d fucked up. In hindsight doing this now was a bit like spitting in the face of the universe.

The thing is, the universe kind of deserved it. No, fuck that- the universe definitely deserved it. He’d been born in the inky black hell that was this world’s heaven, slowly suffocating in a floating tin box. Every time he’d tried to make the best of his situation his happiness had taken root and then imploded. His fall from grace had been literal and figurative. When this stupid fucking drop ship landed and the kids looked at him like he wore a crown of gold, things had started to feel right again. He was able to ignore his fears, shift his guilt to the side, and enjoy the spotlight. For once he had the power to decide who he was. Bellamy, King of whatever the hell we want.

Then the universe flung Clarke Griffin down at his feet and he tripped right over her, right over her inconvenient logic and unwavering devotion to the right thing. She ended his brief reign before he even realized it was over and when the time came for him to end hers before it started, the universe cursed him with the inability to let go of her.

Those first few days painted a perfect picture of their partnership- the last two months- the last four hours. Bellamy has his gun, Clarke has her bravery. When Clarke falls Bellamy is going to catch her- and glare at her even as he saves her life. When all hell breaks loose, it’ll be her fault or his but there will be no peace until they both want it. When Bellamy knows what has to be done but can’t shoulder the burden, Clarke will take it with grace. When Clarke feels like she’s forgotten who she is, Bellamy is there to remind her that it’s just part of survival. 

They will work like the moon and sun, one in dark, one in light. Clarke to heal and Bellamy to guide. The sun to warm the earth and the moon to move the tides. Balance – the universe loves balance. But it also seems to love corrupting that balance. Before long the universe came for Clarke too, Wells, her father’s watch, her mother, Finn, blood caked on her hands like a second skin. Sometimes hurricanes come inland, and if you aren’t prepared they can tear everything apart.

 _“The storm changed their home, but it was still their home”_ Lincoln had told him- months ago when he’d never even seen a hurricane first hand, _“They were thankful for survival, loyal to their land, no tragedy could change that. Baui Catas, they called it. Beautiful disaster.”_  
   
They carry the weight of leadership together- a painful task that reminded him of the stories of Atlas, shouldering the weight of the world as punishment. Deep down he knew that they were no king and queen. They were pawns- just like everyone else, moving around and bumping into one another until fate lit a fire under them that would propel them towards whatever destiny had been theirs since birth.

Maybe it’s all been decided. Maybe the distance between them had a purpose They had kissed and things have gotten bad. He’d nearly lost her and they’d gotten worse. Maybe there was more to the story and their carelessness had just thrown a major wrench in the works, fucked things up far more than they were already fucked up. But then again maybe he was sick of feeling like a character in an epic with a tragic ending looming just a few pages away. Fuck a buildup. Fuck fate. Fuck whatever may or may not have been written in the stars. This happened. This happened and despite the bad timing he doesn’t regret it one goddamn bit.

She is probably another story.

He can still feel her. Every part of her. The warm skin of her shoulders, the few slightly raised freckles along her arms, her hair still wet and windswept, her fingers, her gasps against his neck, her heels in his back, and her entire body trembling like it was coming to life for the first time.

“Did you fall asleep?”

It’s an impulse. She calls out and he answers. “No.”

It doesn’t work both ways- like so many things between them. She should respond to him. She should carry the conversation and meet him halfway. Instead he listens to her silence, focusing on the sound of the storm outside, the sound of what’s between them- chaos.

They’d spent the last hour in another world, borrowing time in a land of maybe and could be. There she’d been anything but quiet. She’d said his name like he was her hero. She’d sighed, begged, given in to every sound that fought its way from her body. Her sounds are almost the easiest thing to remember about that place. It’s all still echoing, every breath hangs around the top of the dropship like steam. He’s unbearably aggravated that he can’t just file them away with every other noise he’d ever heard come out of a woman. Here, in the real world, he had memories (very recent memories) of Clarke screaming, sobbing, cursing his name, contradicting him, questioning him. Her laugh was practically mythological, almost as rare as a genuine smile, but in that Neverland they’d slipped into she’d glowed with it. Her lips had absolutely grinned against his.

_A trick of the light._

If it were anyone else, now would be the time he’d try to drift off to sleep, wait out the storm without dealing with the awkward silence, but this is Clarke. This was a colossal mistake that doesn’t feel like one, no matter what he tells himself. This woman, who had once been nothing more than a thorn in his fucking side, was like his right goddamn hand, she was an exposed nerve, a thirst, an instinct. She was survival.

“I uh-,” he wipes his face with his hand. His eyes sting from sweat, “this wasn’t why I said what I said.”

“I know.” She sounds confident, but he knows that if her pants hadn’t been lying on the other side of him she’d be as far away from him as possible.

“I said it because I’m sick and fucking tired of you acting like you can do whatever you want without it affecting everyone else.” He’s always grounded himself with anger, revisiting it whenever he starts to feel lighter. The bullshit she pulled today was basically a pair of concrete shoes. If he can just focus on them-rather than the skin on his chest where her handprints still burn.

“I don’t need a white knight Bellamy,” she says simply. “I understand that you have this- hero thing.”

It’s almost like they actually exist, those heavy concrete shoes. 

“I don't have a hero thing.”

She lets out a sigh, “What else would you call it?”

He thought he’d just made that pretty clear.

“I know you Bellamy,” she says.

“Not nearly as well as you think you do.”

“You’re right,” she says, “this morning I didn’t know about that birthmark on your thigh.“

It’s cheap and completely uncharacteristic. It’s how he knows that she’s barely got a grip on her well-practiced composure. It certainly must be difficult to be regal when you’ve just fucked out three years of sexual tension, it would have been quite a challenge to keep a crown balanced on her head during that last bit.

“So that’s how you’re gonna deal with this?” he asks. “Bad jokes?”

The silence this time is a bit more brooding than awkward. He imagines that her face is pinched in that pretentious pouty look she always gets when he calls her out.

“Except neither of us will be laughing because it’s not funny,” he continues.

Suddenly her hands come down hard at her sides, he can tell by the sound of the impact that she’s got her fingers clenched into fists. “So what do you suggest? We just lay here naked in the freezing cold and continue to stare at the ceiling until this fucking storm ends?”

It would be so easy for him to make a genuinely filthy comment or roll over and let his lips mark her skin and give himself a chance to re-catalogue all of her sounds, but that would only work if what had just happened was simple fucking. It wasn’t. It was clear to him. It had to be clear to her. Whatever had just happened was different and as much as he didn’t want to be the one to point it out- he has a feeling that that’s what it will come down to.

“You have to trust me with my own life,” she says, “stop treating me like a child and have some faith in me.”

He has more faith in her than he’s ever had in anything. The fact that she still doesn’t see that after everything they’ve been through makes him want to start yelling again.

“Haven’t we beaten this fucking horse to death?” he seethes. “You and I can both make our own choices- if I chose to think your choices are fucking stupid than I have that right-”

“You can think whatever you want, just don’t put your life or the lives of our people at risk to try to control my choices.”

“I’m not trying to control you Clarke. Why should I feel guilty about wanting to keep you alive!?”

“Why can’t you just trust me to keep myself alive?”

“I trust you with everything.”

It was true, explicitly, He trusted her even when she’d proved to be untrustworthy.

“Wanting to protect you is not the same as not trusting you,” he says. “I fight with you because you frustrate me, I get pissed off because I don’t like seeing you take unnecessary risks, but I have always trusted you- more than anyone.”

He finally looks over at her. At some point in their back and forth she’d sat up, the jacket she’d been using to cover up with had fallen down to her waist. Clearly she’d forgotten that she was naked and even as she met his eyes she tried not to panic and cover herself up. Meanwhile he was just trying not to count the little half-circles of blooming purple he’d left on every inch of exposed skin he could find.

Things had gotten out of hand.

“If that’s true, then you’ll understand when I tell you that you’re far too fucking important to dedicate any of your life to chasing after me. I will always owe you my life. You will always be my hero, but please don’t ever die for me.” She says- looking him right in the eye like she wasn’t naked, like everything between them hadn’t just changed. And goddamn if it didn’t make his chest feel like it was burning. This was absolutely ridiculous. Here a girl that looks like Clarke is naked less than an arm’s length away from him, a girl who had been running out into storms long before today, but he couldn’t be angry, couldn’t even really focus on the lust. The absolute truth of this whole situation, the whole situation, his very existence on this planet even, is that he fucking needs this girl.

He can’t say that it’s a secret. It’s not something he actively tries to hide or even pays attention to really. It’s just a thing. The sky is blue, they’re running low on ammunition, and Clarke matters. Clarke matters in a way that very few other people matter. She burrowed her way into his life like a fucking parasite, but he’d never exactly fought it.

This was a long time coming. A lot of people would probably tell you so.- although it's admittedly not the the ideal situation seeing as they were hiding from a massive storm in the rusty old dropship and they had no idea what they’d be walking into when they made it back to camp.

Maybe it was that she finally proved to him that she understood what they were to each other. She was standing there yelling at him, completely unintimidated and confident and he just…wanted her. It had happened before, wanting her. Clarke was beautiful and when you spend as much time as he did around someone who was beautiful- you get ideas. It’s not unexpected. The feelings he had that day though, that wasn’t a healthy burst of  _she’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, why the hell is she so fucking hot_. It was more like a bolt of purpose, something screaming  _this woman is your beginning and end_  in his ear and then punching him in the gut.

“There’s no point in having this argument again,” she finally says, pulling her undershirt over her head and laying back down. “Neither of us is going to change, this is just going to keep happening.”

Concrete shoes. 

“What’s going to keep happening? You doing stupid shit or the sex?”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

He tucks his arms behind his head, “No, no you’re going pretty far out of your way to avoid talking about that.”

He expected her to be panicky, especially because there’s nowhere for her to hide, but really she just seems annoyed. “What is there to say? We – there was tension. It needed to happen.”

“Three times?”

She shakes her head. “Calm down hotshot. It was not three times.”

He sits up and raises his eyebrows at her, “It was absolutely three times.”

She looks away from him, making a face he’s seen others make when they’re doing complicated math in their head. “You could make an argument for two and a half-“

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

She glances at him out of the corner of her eye, and squirms a bit. His smirk is so wide its almost painful. “The- middle time…thing… I didn’t really-“

“Yes you fucking did.” He has a vivid memory of that, and every other time.

“Not compared to the other two.” She’s arguing just for the sake of arguing now.

“Want me to try again?” he asks, turning to face her and almost laughing when she pulls away.

“Don’t. Stay right there- and put your pants on.”

“Stop blushing Councilwoman, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

He raises his eyebrows at her. She groans and squeezes her eyes shut, mumbling something like “I can never say that again,” under her breath. Which is true, because as …..enthusiastic as he’d been, she’d certainly taken a lot more initiative than he’d expected- which was probably why his bottom lip was slightly swollen and his back was burning.

He looked over at her as she covered her arm with her eyes. He’d been so furious with her earlier, so convinced that he’d be able to ignore her. But as stupid and reckless as she was, sometimes she just looked at him and everything suddenly made sense. She was right. Neither of them was ever going to change. She was always going to be danger. Always. And he was never going to learn.

“Look,” she said, “when I do things- without involving you, you have to understand that it’s because I don’t want you to feel like it’s on you. I sent Monty. I was responsible for them. You had your own things to worry about, the armory, your sister-”

“First of all you didn’t send Monty, he asked to go and we all approved it, so you can’t do that. You can’t take on that burden-“

“But I will though, I will always do that. Every fucking time.”

“Why?”

She turns her head and looks at him, and he feels like an idiot for thinking it, but if hurricane was a color it would definitely match the blue of her eyes. 

“This is hard,” she says “all of this, everything, it’s always going to be hard. But it doesn’t have to be hard for the both of us all of the time. I take some weight off of the pile, maybe I put off you’re back breaking for another day.”

“We just went through this Clarke. It’s not your job to decide what I can and can’t handle.”

“You do it for me every chance you get,” she says, “unapologetically.”

There is no line for Octavia. He would do the unthinkable for her- he has done the unthinkable for her, knowing that wouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s braved unimaginable horrors, committed travesties for these people, their people. Family is family and there hasn’t been much that Bellamy wasn’t willing to do for his family, but Clarke is something else entirely. His thing with her- it’s not based in logic. It’s not heroism, it’s not him being a leader, taking responsibility for her life the way he’s done the rest of them. He thinks about all of the forests that he would burn to the ground to get to her if she needed him. If she called out, said his name in that desperate way she has when she’s needed his shoulder or his gun. The answer itself isn’t as scary as the fact that it doesn’t scare him at all. Every one, every tree, every meadow, every fucking mountain- without a second of hesitation. It’s something fierce and overpowering that claws its way out of him- even when he tries to suppress it. Reach out for her, forgive her, find her, save her.

They sit in what feels like their hundredth charged silence of the day. It may be his imagination, but it sounds like the storm is quieting outside. They may even be able to trek back to camp before it gets dark.

“Bellamy,” Clarke says in a small voice, “What just happened?”

“There’s a word for it,” he says, “I won’t say it. You sure as fuck won’t say it. But there’s a word for it.”

“We can’t do that.” She looks over at him, “we can’t.”

“I know that.” he admits. He thinks of a gun hidden in his waistband and her perfect blonde eyebrows raised so far they broke even with her perfect blonde hair. “Clarke you’ve known exactly who I am from the day we got here.”

She shakes her head, “You’re nothing like that person.”

“I will always be exactly like that person,” he says. “When I love someone, there’s nothing that I won’t do to protect them, but I’m selfish, take whatever I fucking want is an instinct for me, like survival-“

“Take whatever you-.”

“Don’t start talking over me. I’m not finished.” He cuts her off before she can work herself up again. “You-“ he stumbles uncharacteristically through his words, “this- this is on me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I wanted this-“

“So did I.” She says it so quickly that it surprises both of them.

“I didn’t care what it would mean for you, or for us-“

“It doesn’t have to-“

“I don’t know what would happen if I loved someone like that. Because other than my sister and a few guns - I haven’t had anything that felt like it was-“ he shakes his head, “That guy you couldn’t fucking stand, I’ll become him again, I don’t want to be-“

“Just because we had sex doesn’t mean we love each other.”

She’s right, but they do.

He’s had a lot of time to understand that.

Once Octavia told him about the sea. She said, up close the water isn’t nearly as blue as it seems from far away, really it’s a murky brown color- choppy and violent and unwelcoming. It’s the blue of the sky that bleeds life into it – a reflection that illuminates the paradoxically unclear water and makes it look like something beautiful – at least to someone standing far, far away. That’s them really. That’s exactly what it’s like to love her. He’s just not sure if she’s the sky or the sea or both.

"I can’t be in love with you,” she says. “ I can love you- I do love you, but I can’t be in love with you.”

It doesn’t really hurt to hear her say it, because he knew it was true, but he also knew that there was no one else on Earth that felt about him the way she did- if she couldn’t call it love than that was fine. "Then don't be,” he says, “It doesn’t change anything."

"You can’t be in love with me."

He smiles a little, because she’s absolutely fucking ridiculous. "I don’t take orders from you."

"Bellamy-"

"Clarke, I would never tell you I was in love with you, you don’t have to worry about that,” because he knows it would terrify her, “and I would never let someone else suffer because of how I may or may not feel about you." Because he’d been the one that handed Finn the gun in the first place.

“We’re going to die for these people, one way or the other,” she says.

“Probably not at the same time,” he repeats her earlier argument.

“So co-dependency isn’t an option.”

“No.”

“Distance,” she says.

“Calculated distance.”

“So we deal with this,” she gestures between them, “like we’ve dealt with everything else.”

He knows what she means. Suffer through it. Because this is who you are.

“Yeah.”

“Together.”

“Together.”

 

 

 

 

When the wind dies down, they walk back to camp side by side- past down trees and broken fences, and a hole in the southeast corner of the wall that certainly hadn’t been there before.

In the morning they’ll start to rebuild- for now they stand in front of the gate.

Bellamy keeps his eyes in front of him, but he edges towards her, his hand brushing against hers, “I missed you,” he says- and he’s said a lot of shit that afternoon, but this- this has absolutely been the hardest, because it’s honest and powerful and not cloaked in anger or duty. 

He hated the silence of the last few weeks.

He hated living here without really having her at his side.

She grabs his hand and squeezes, “We can do this,” she says.

And just like that- he’s home. In their mess of a camp, with his mess of a partner 

A man who dabbled in being the villain, who was selfish and arrogant and tenacious, who carried the weight of the world strapped to his back like a rifle and stumbled into being a hero, a king and a knight; with a girl- an angry girl who’d lost every man who’d ever loved her, who marched with her head held high even when there was blood on her hands, a beacon of hope and a voice of reason who still had to make the hard choices, a leader, who drew pictures and loved a watch and made wishes on falling stars. 

Two lonely people from opposite ends of a post-apocalyptic spectrum, in the midst of war and acid fog and fear that hung around like the moon, managed to find something safe within each other. 

And it’s all a complete disaster - but it’s pretty goddamn beautiful.

 

Fin. (For real this time.)


End file.
